Laryngeal contrast and tone in Tamang: A preliminary study

Tamang is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken mainly in Nepal. There are conflicting claims regarding laryngeal/tonal contrast of Tamang stops. This study focuses on the phonetic realization of stops, and investigates the laryngeal contrast of this relatively understudied language, especially considering lexical tones. Following the phonetic and phonological descriptions of Tamang by Mazaudon (1973), Tamang has been described as a language with contrastive tones. Mazaudon describes that Tamang has four tones with distinctions in pitch and voice quality: Tone 1 (high falling pitch) and Tone 2 (high level) have modal whereas Tone 3 (low level) and Tone 4 (low-rising) have breathy phonation. Further, she claims that aspiration contrast is observed only in Tone 1 and 2 words, and Tone 3 and 4 can be voiced (Mazaudon 2014). Varenkamp (to appear, cited in Sung-Woo Lee 2011), on the other hand, reports there are no phonemically voiced stops as none of Tamang stops are acoustically voiced. On the contrary, Yonjan (1993) argues there is a 3-way contrast of aspirated/unaspirated/voiced stops without assuming phonological tones. Four female speakers of Eastern Tamang participated in the recording. Seven stop-initial monosyllabic words were recorded 5 times in random order. Voice onset time (VOT) of the stops and f0 of the following vowels were measured. The results show that VOT values clearly separate the stops into three groups; long positive VOT, short positive VOT, and negative VOT, supporting the three categories of stop contrast argued by Yonjan (1993). Interestingly, f0 movements of the three categories do not exhibit significant differences. The lack of difference in f0 suggests that the tonal distinction reported by Mazaudon (1973, 2014) may not be present, at least in the dialects we recorded. Still, it is not clear if this is a dialectal difference or a tone loss, which requires further studies.