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

Contact Induced Change? 5
of Châu Đốc Cham, which is reproduced in (4), is still valuable. Note that short vowels
seem to have been omitted from their description.
(4) Vowel system of Châu Đốc Cham (Friberg and Hor 1977) 5
Register: High Low High Low High Low
i� i �� ɨ u� � u
e� e� i �� �� � o� o� u
æ e� � a a� � o� �
To sum up the content of (4), the Châu Đốc variety of Western Cham contrasts
register in three ways. First, vowels always have a laxer (‘breathier’ is used on p.3) vowel
quality in the low than in the high register, but the exact realization of the phonation
contrast is relative and depends on vowel height. In high vowels, the high register is tense
and the low register is modal. In mid-vowels, the high register is tense and the low register
is lax. Lastly, in low vowels, the high register is modal and the low register is lax. The
second phonetic element used to contrast registers is vowel quality. We see in (4) that all
vowels except /i/ and /a/ have slight differences in height or in offgliding. Low register
vowels are systematically higher than high register vowels. Finally, the low “register also
displays a lower pitch in analogous vowels” (Friberg and Hor 1977, p.31).
1.2.3 Western Cham (Cambodia)
There are two descriptions of the register systems of Western Cham dialects spoken in
Cambodia. The first one analyses the speech of a young male speaker from Kompong
Thom (Headley 1991). The other one is based on recordings of a male speaker by Neil
Baumgartner (Edmondson and Gregerson 1993). According to Kenneth Gregerson, the
recordings are from Cambodia, but we have not been able to obtain more information on
the speaker’s dialect.
In his paper, Headley did not systematically explore the phonetic differences
between registers, but he described the low register vowels (his high register) as “higher
(in terms of tongue height), rather ‘breathy’ in voice quality, and associated with a low
pitch”. High register vowels on the other hand (his low register) are “lower in tongue
height, often with lower on-glides, rather ‘clear’ in voice quality, and associated with
higher pitch.” (Headley 1991, p.106). This is rather similar to Friberg and Hor (1977)’s
description of Châu Đốc Cham, although Headley’s examples suggest that the exact vowel
qualities are slightly different. An important observation here is that the dialect studied by
Headley seems to have a vowel quality register contrast even for the vowel /i/.
Edmondson and Gregerson (1993) obtained similar results instrumentally.
Although they could not find a clear pattern for voice quality (measured through intensity),
perhaps because of limited data, they found that the high register has a slightly higher f0
than the low register. However, the most central cue for register contrast in the dialect they
studied seems to be vowel quality: low register vowels always have a lower F1 (higher
5 The choice of the diacritics for breathy phonation ( �) and creaky phonation ( �) was made for convenience
only. Friberg and Hor (1977) describe the two types of phonation as lax and tense, respectively.