The Cao Bang Theory

1. The Cao Bang Theory Michael Weiss Department of Linguistics Cornell University ECIEC XXVIII June 13, 2009 University of Iceland Reykjavík

2. The Cao Bang Theory The Helix Nebula

3. Things everyone in this audience will agree on • The stop systems of the attested IE languages are best derived from the post-Brugmannian standard: *Was breathiness really obligatory? See Davis 1994 on Hindi.

4. Reconstruction of breathy series • Both Indic and Proto-Armenian have the breathy series. • Since contrastive breathy stops are not common, they should be reconstructed for PIE. • On Armenian see Garrett 1991, 1998.

5. Nonarchaism of Germanic and Armenian • Loanwords in both Germanic and Armenian show that they have innovated in devoicing the voiced series. (Barrack 2003, et al.) • Loanwords from Germanic into Finnish with voiced stop exhibit pre- and post-Grimm’s Law treatments. (Rasmussen 1987)

6. Distinctness of three series • Some evidence for distinct treatment of voiced and breathy series everywhere but Anatolian and Albanian. • Winter’s Law in PBS • *gw≠ *gwh in Celtic (Cowgill 1980) • *d > ts, *t, *dh > t in Tocharian (Pinault 2008) • Some evidence for distinct treatment of voiced and voiceless series everywhere.

7. Comparative evidence for “Glottalic Theory” dubious • Lachmann’s Law • See Jasanoff 2006 • Winter’s Law • lengthening before voiced stops common cross-linguistically • small qualm: vowels before breathy stops tend to be longer than before voiced stops. So why lengthening only before voiced stops? • Other evidence of lesser value

8. But are we satisfied with this? • The specific 3-way contrast reconstructed for PIE is very uncommon. Roman Jakobson

9. Jakobson 1957:528 • To my knowledge, no language adds to the pair /t/ – /d/ a voiced aspirate /dh/ without having its voiceless counterpart /th/, while /t/, /d/, /th/ frequently occur without the comparatively rare /dh/, and such a stratification is easily explainable (cf. Jakobson-Halle); therefore theories operating with the three phonemes /t/ – /d/ – /dh/ in Proto- Indo-European must reconsider the question of their phonemic essence.

10. Jakobson and Halle 1956:27 • The presence of B implies the presence of A and, correspondingly, B cannot emerge in the phonemic pattern of a language unless A is there. • This is a non-explanation explanation. • Is Jakobson’s observation still true?

11. The alleged cases of Kelabit, Madurese and Mbatto • Kelabit (Blust 1969, 2006) • aspirated labial, alveolar, and velar stops, respectively, which begin voiced and end voiceless. Except in the environment after schwa, they have approximately twice the duration of the stops in the other two series. They are found only intervocalically. Kelabit, Sarawak, Malaysia

12. Kelabit does not exactly have murmured stops. təpuʔ [təp:uʔ] ‘grandparent (vocative)’ tabuh [tabuh] ‘container made from a dried gourd’ təbhuh [təbphuh] ‘sugarcane’

13. But the voiced aspirates are unitary segments. • there are no morpheme internal clusters. • the voiceless stops are unaspirated. So if bh etc. are really clusters where does aspiration come from?

14. Possible analysis after Kehrein 2002 • The make-up of laryngeal contrast for stops: with the three features voice, spread, constricted there can be a maximum of six contrasting types. • The ordering of the laryngeal and super-laryngeal gestures cannot be distinctive.

15. In the case of [+ spread], [+ voiced]: [+spread] [+ spread] [+ spread] [+ voice] [+voice] [+ voice] SL SL SL Igbo [b̤] Hindi [bɦ] Kelabit [bph] (SL = Supra-laryngeal) • If this is correct then Kelabit is a true counter-example to Jakobson’s claim.

16. Historical origin of Kelabit voiced aspirates: • Voiced geminates arising through assimilation or gemination after stressed schwa: PMP *bakbak‘peel of skin or bark’ > BK bəbhak‘torn’ PMP *beduk (kind of monkey) > *bədduk > BK bədhuk

17. Mbatto • Mbatto was first brought into the literature by Comrie 1993 (and again in 2001), but the case is problematic. • Mbatto does have a three way stop contrast with two types of voiced series, but the contrast is between non-implosive and implosive voiced stops. (Stewart 1993)

18. Mbatto, a member of Kwa branch of of Atlantic-Congo branch of Niger-Congo family • Mvmmb Mbatto region, Côte d’Ivoire

19. Mbatto • The Mbatto system descends from a Proto-Potou system with a four-way contrast between voiced and voiceless implosive and non-implosives.

20. Madurese (Austronesian, Madura, Indonesia) has a three-way phonation contrast, but it is simply voiced, voiceless, and aspirated. The aspirated series is voiceless. (Cohn and Ham 1999)

21. But the Madurese case is still interesting. • Proto-Malayo-Polynesian had only a simple voicing contrast. • The PMP voiceless stops are retained. • The PMP voiced stops become voiceless aspirates. • The new voiced series arises from glide hardening.

22. So how do we get from voiced to voiceless aspirate? • *b > *p > ph? but the voiceless stops are unchanged. • *b > *bh > ph seems to be the only other option.

23. Conclusion: None of the languages alleged attest exactly the reconstructed PIE system. • Kelabit does not have breathy stops, but it does have something which may be phonologically indistinguishable. • Mbatto does have two voiced series, but neither is breathy. • Madurese does not have breathy stops, but it seems plausible that breathy stops were a mid-stage.

24. Does this mean Jakobson was right and that we must reject the post-Brugmannian standard? • Hale and Reiss 2008 on what is UG • Attested (English-type grammars, etc.) • Attestable (“Japanese” in 200 years) • Humanly computable (p > s/_r) • Statable (V > V: in prime numbered syllables)

25. There seems to be little doubt that a language with a three-way phonation contrast is computable. • Three-way contrasts (of various sorts) are common. • The primes of representation are independent. • either the “breathy” type is [+ voice], [+ spread glottis] or [+ breathy]. In either case nothing computational prevents the separate manipulation of breathy and aspirated stops. • If phonology is substance-free, the phonetic realization of the the three series is irrelevant.

26. The reason the PIE type is rare or unattested must be diachronic, i.e. the pathways leading to it must be few or non-existent.

27. In particular, the reason the breathy series typically co-occurs with voiceless aspirates is either • (a) because a sound change producing breathy stops must also produce aspirated stops, whereas the reverse is not true. • (b) because there are more diachronic pathways to aspiration than to breathiness and therefore it is likely that a language which has breathy stops will also have aspirated ones. Further there must be many pathways away from the PIE system.

28. If (a) is the true explanation the PIE system should really be excludable and we must despite everything revise the reconstruction for PIE. • If (b) is the true explanation, then the PIE system can stand as such. • Itmightindeedbe arare system and may have come into existence relatively recently.

29. All this reasoning would be unacceptable to scholars who are committed to incorpartingmarkedness into phonology (OT, HS) or Economy (Martinet, Clements), but I’ll let them speak for themselves. • The crucial question is: Are there known sound changes which produce breathy stops and do not simultaneously produce aspirates?

30. Where do breathy stops come from? • Languages with alleged breathy stops • Khoisan: !Xu • Bantu: Xhosa, Copi, Tsonga • Igbo • Armenian • The Indosphere • Indo-Aryan: all except Kashmiri and Punjabi • Austro-Asiatic: Kharia, Mundari, Santali • Sino-Tibetan: Newari, etc. • Dravidian: Telugu, Kurux

31. We can eliminate the Indosphere languages since the non-Indo-Aryan languages have acquired them from the Indo-Aryan ones (Neukom 1999) and we don’t know where thosebreathy voiced stops came from.

32. Armenian dialects probably inherited them from PIE, but if they didn’t, they changed the voiced stops into breathy stops and also at some time changed voiceless stops into aspirates. As far as we know these could have resulted from the same sound change.

33. The African languages are tricky • Most of the Southern Bantu examples are debatable. The consonants which act as tone depressors are not necessarily breathy voiced stops. See Traill 1990. • The Igbo examples are very well established, • http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter12/igbo.html (Ladefoged 1976) • According to Hyman 1972 they derive from earlier consonants with nasal release. Both the voiceless and the voiced aspirates arose in this way. (Matisoff’srhinoglottophilia)

34. So in the one certain case (Igbo) and the one possible case (Armenian) the same sound change that introduced the breathy stops also introduced or may have introduced the voiceless aspirates. • Here we finally come to Cao Bang.

35. Cao Bang • Cao Bang is the name of a Central Tai language spoken in Northern Viet Nam. The Cao Bang province of Viet Nam

36. Pittayawat (Joe) Pittayaporn. 2009. The phonology of Proto-Tai, Cornell University Ph.D. thesis. • Li, Fang-Kuei. 1977. Handbook of Comparative Tai.

37. Pittayaporn demonstrates that the voiceless aspirates are not to be reconstructed for Proto-Thai. They arise in CT and SWT from PT *Tr

38. So Proto-Tai had a three-way contrast phonologically identical to that of Mbatto: *t, *d, *ɗ • What happened to this system? • In most dialects the voiced series is devoiced merging with the voiceless series and the implosives become simple voiced stops.

39. In a few languages on the Sino-Vietnamese border voicing is retained in the voiced series (Wenma), but in Cao Bang the voiced series become breathy. • The implosives become voiced stops.

40. Cao Bang labial stops • /b̤aB2/ ‘to mate’ • /baB1/ ‘shoulder’ • /paB1/ ‘grove’ • /phaB1/ ‘to split’ < Chinese 破.

41. A Spectrogram of b̤a aspiration b̤ voicing

42. In the closely related dialect Dao Ngan Day studied by Ross (1996), the implosives are realized as preglottalized stops and the voiced series are phonetically either simple voiced stops, breathy stops, or breathy fricatives. • Cao Bang does have voiceless aspirates from the Tr- clusters and loanwords.

43. But the interesting point is that, for the first time to my knowledge, we have an example of breathy stops originating through a sound change totally independent of the origin of aspirates.

44. One could argue that Jakobson’s observation is still valid (as descriptively it may be—for historically attested languages) and that the creation of the voiceless aspirates primedlearners to be sensitive to the potential distinctiveness of [± spread glottis]

45. Although priming is plausible—and hence might explain the rarity of the PIE system—there is no necessity that a feature be expressed at timen in order to make us of that distinction at timen+1. • Most compensatory lengthenings introduce new instances of length to languages where length was already distinctive, but in Friulian compensatory lengthening introduces distinctive vowel length into a language which previously didn’t have it.

46. The example of Cao Bang shows that breathy stops may arise by a sound change not creating aspirates. • The standard post-Brugmannian reconstruction cannot be rejected out of hand. • It’s rarity and shortlivedness can be explained as the result of the diachronic filter.

47. Speculations on Prehistory • Some oddities of the voiced series are not indicative of much • the rarity of *b: became *w initially? (Barrack 2006, et al.) • The ban on DeD: In fact identical manner is disfavored in CVC. So what is odd is not the rarity of DED but the frequency of TET (O/E = 1.31) and especially DheDh (O/E = 2.46). [O/E = Observed/Expected]

48. O/E values for manner (Cooper 2009)

49. Some additional oddities • The voiced stops don’t occur in inflectional morphology, but the breathy series does. • Final voicing

50. It has often been suggested that the voiced series was or continues a non-modal series. • ejectives (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1973, Hopper 1973, etc.) • implosives (Haider 1985) • both (Kortlandt)