Tibeto-Burman Tonology.

AuthorMatisoff, James A.

ALFONS WEIDERT WAS SOMETHING OF a tragic figure in Tibeto-Burman (TB) linguistics. His premature, violent death under suspicious circumstances in Bangkok in 1988 deprived the world of a brilliant, yet erratic, scholar, who had personally carried out fieldwork on over 40 TB languages and dialects in Nepal, Bhutan, and, especially, in northeast India--even across the border in western Burma, one of the most inaccessible parts of the TB area. Much of this material was irrevocably lost when a suitcase crammed full of unique copies of his fieldnotes was stolen in India. This is the more unfortunate since many native speakers had given their all to provide that data--by all accounts W. was a humorless and demanding elicitor, so hard on his informants that he was dismissed in 1984 from his research position with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's "Lesser-known Languages of Nepal" project. The book under review "TBT" constitutes most of the material which survives from W.'s years of fieldwork; it is also a faithful reflection of the author's complex personality.

Candor compels me to admit that I undertake this review with mixed feelings, in view of my own rocky relationship with W. through the years. After a friendly enough beginning in the mid-1970s, he precipitated an angry exchange of articles in the early 1980s (Weidert 1981; Matisoff 1982), creating a mood between us which no doubt accounts for TBT's calculated avoidance of all mention of my work, even in the chapter on Lolo-Burmese tonology (ch. IV), an omission which stunned a previous reviewer ("On s'etonnera de l'absence de reference aux travaux de Matisoff" [Mazaudon 1988: 307!). When he does use my terminology or research conclusions it is without attribution. He uses the term "tonogenesis" throughout the book, but nowhere does he indicate that it was I who coined it (Matisoff 1970). This being said, I will try to be as fair as I can.

The great TB family, with its 250 languages extending from the Himalayas through southwest China and peninsular southeast Asia, is as internally diversified in its phonological and grammatical typology as Indo-European. Especially striking is the wide variety of ways in which TB languages exploit the prosodic features of pitch higher vs. lower), contour (level vs. rising vs. falling), and/or phonation type (clear, breathy, creaky voice) to distinguish utterances. Some branches of TB (Lolo-Burmese, Karenic, Baic) have full-blown "omnisyllabic tone" systems, where almost every syllable bears one of several distinctive tones (as in Chinese, Tai, Hmong-Mien, or Vietnamese); in the heterogeneous Himalayan and Kamarupan (northeast India) branches, many languages have prosodic contrasts spread over two or more syllables in a word ("word-tones" or "contouremes") ; others have only a rudimentary contrast of low functional load between high and low pitch, or between clear vs. marked phonation; while still others lack any distinctive prosodic contrasts at all. Languages like Jinghpaw (Kachin) occupy an intermediate position, with contrastive tones on all roots, but many unstressed and tonally marginal prefixal syllables.

This prosodic diversity is intimately connected to differences in syllable structure in the various branches of the family, which in turn reflect deep areal influences from the monosyllabic "Sinosphere" or the polysyllabic "Indosphere" (see below). The seeds of prosodic change are everywhere observable. Some languages are in the process of acquiring tonal contrasts (tonogenesis), while others are losing them; there are even cases (Tibetan, Qiang) where one and the same language now has both tonal and non-tonal dialects.

Can this bewildering synchronic diversity be traced back to a single prosodic system at the Proto-TB (PTB) stage? Such is the position taken in Benedict 1972, who posits a two-way tonal contrast as far back as Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST, i.e., the ancestral language of Chinese and TB), on the basis of limited and highly selective data from Chinese and a few "key" TB languages. Yet the possibility of establishing regular correspondences between the tone systems of different subgroups of TB, even at much shallower time-depths, has been seriously questioned (e.g., Mazaudon 1985, for Tamangic and Karenic; Matisoff 1974, 1991, for Lolo-Burmese and Jinghpaw).

In his important (though overly formalistic) 1979 paper, W. claimed to have discovered the proto-system of "tonal categories" (TC) that underlies all the modem prosodic systems of the Kuki-Chin-Naga (KCN) and Barish (=Bodo-Garo-Konyak) languages. He conceived of this KCN/BGK protosystem in terms of phonation types rather than tone, and...

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