proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

4 Marc Brunelle
the speech of some speakers, as summarized in (3), have led a number of authors to claim
that this language is either tonal or incipiently tonal.
(3) An example of a description of the pitch allophones of the two registers in Eastern
Cham (Phú et al. 1992)
pa high pitch ‘to cross’
pa� high pitch ‘four’
p�a low pitch, breathy ‘to carry’
p�a� low rising pitch, breathy ‘to wander (rare)’
However, what different authors mean by “tone” is highly variable. The first modern
descriptions often designated the register allophones as ‘tones’ or ‘pitches’ without
claiming that they were phonemic (Blood 1967; Moussay 1971; Hoàng 1987). These
authors recognized (sometimes implicitly) that there were only two distinctive registers
contrasting in pitch, but that each of them had predictable variants conditioned by codas.
Another group of authors has more recently adopted the view that the codas are either lost,
in the process of being dropped, or reinterpreted as tonal elements, which comes down to
claiming that the register allophones have become contrastive tones (Phú et al. 1992;
Thurgood 1993; 1996; 1999). We have since gathered evidence that codas are still present
and that although they are partly debuccalized, they preserve their patterns of contrast and
show no sign of deletion (Brunelle 2005b; 2006). Moreover, the pitch curves of codaconditioned
register allophones vary across speakers, making them unlikely contrastive
elements (Brunelle 2005b; 2006). Finally, evidence from reduplication and a word game
strongly suggests that register can be phonologically analysed as a segmental property of
onset consonants (Brunelle 2005a; b). Until we have additional phonological evidence, and
despite the central role of pitch in its register contrast and the fact that all the basic
ingredients needed for tonogenesis are present, we must conclude that there is at the
moment no evidence that the dialects of Eastern Cham that have been studied so far have
phonemic tone or are incipiently tonal.
1.2.2 Western Cham (Châu Đốc)
There is only one description of register in a dialect of Western Cham spoken in Vietnam
(Friberg and Hor 1977) 4 . Impressionistically, this dialect, spoken in Châu Đốc, seems
similar to the Western Cham dialects spoken elsewhere in Vietnam (in Tây Ninh and in a
small settlement near Xuân Lộc, in Đồng Nai province).
In this description, Friberg and Hor followed Gregerson (1973) in claiming that
tongue root position is responsible for the register contrast in the dialect that they studied.
They hypothesized that all low register consonants are produced with an advanced tongue
root [+TRA], while other consonants are produced with a neutral tongue root position.
Since the claim that the tongue-root is the main articulator involved in register production
has since been abandoned, we will not discuss the technicalities of Friberg and Hor’s
featural analysis. However, their acoustic description of the effect of register on the vowels
4
Friberg and Hor are not explicitly saying that they investigated the Châu Đốc dialect. This information in
mentioned in Headley (1991).