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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 44:2 (2021) ► pp.183–208

East Tusom

A phonetic and phonological sketch of a largely undocumented Tangkhulic language

| Carnegie Mellon University
| University of Pittsburgh
East Tusom is a Tibeto-Burman language of Manipur, India, belonging to the Tangkhulic group. While it shares some innovations with the other Tangkhulic languages, it differs markedly from “Standard Tangkhul” (which is based on the speech of Ukhrul town). Past documentation is limited to a small set of hastily transcribed forms in a comparative reconstruction of Tangkhulic rhymes (Mortensen & Miller 2013; Mortensen 2012). This paper presents the first substantial sketch of an aspect of the language: its (descriptive) phonetics and phonology. The data are based on recordings of an extensive wordlist (730 items) and one short text, all from one fluent native speaker in her mid-twenties. We present the phonetic inventory of East Tusom and a phonemicization, with exhaustive examples. We also present an overview of the major phonological patterns and generalizations in the language. Of special interest are a “placeless nasal” that is realized as nasalization on the preceding vowel unless it is followed by a consonant, and numerous plosive-fricative clusters (where the fricative is roughly homorganic with the following vowel) that have developed from historical aspirated plosives. A complete wordlist, organized by gloss and semantic field, is provided as appendices.
Keywords: phonetics, phonology, clusters, placeless nasal, assimilation, language documentation, Tangkhulic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The East Tusom language
    • 1.2East Tusom and Tangkhulic
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • 2.1Speaker
    • 2.2Materials
    • 2.3Elicitation techniques
    • 2.4Recording equipment
    • 2.5Transcription methodology
  • 3.Phonetics
    • 3.1Consonant phones
      • 3.1.1Plosives
      • 3.1.2Nasal stops
      • 3.1.3Fricatives
      • 3.1.4Trills and approximants
    • 3.2Vowel phones
    • 3.3Phonetics of tone
  • 4.Phonology
    • 4.1Phonological inventory
    • 4.2Phoneme summary
    • 4.3Syllable structure
    • 4.4Stress and weight
    • 4.5Tones
    • 4.6Onsets
    • 4.7Rhymes
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.21009.mor
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