Priyankoo Sarmah, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Florida, recently presented two papers on tonal languages of Northeast India. The papers were based on his research on the tonality of Bodo and Mizo. He had started his exploration of tonality of several languages from the Northeast of India when he was a student at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad, India. He has continued the research at the University of Florida during the past two years. A tonal language is one where a single written word can have a number of different meanings depending on how it is pronounced. Though the word may be written in exactly the same way with an identical sequence of letters, variations in the pitch can significantly change the meaning. An example of a widely spoken tonal language is Mandarin Chinese in its many forms. There are many tonal languages in East Asia, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa although they are rare in Europe or the Middle East. In Europe, Lithuanian, a distant cousin of Sanskrit, is a tonal language. Some of the native languages of the Americas are also tonal. Assamese is not tonal. However, there are many tonal languages in Northeast India, especially those belonging to the Tibeto- Burman family. Mon-Khmer languages such as Khasi are not tonal.
Priyankoo presented the paper titled "An Instrumental Analysis of Mizo Tones and Tone Alterations in Mizo Compound Words" at an annual meeting called the South Asian Linguistic Analysis, held in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in September 2005. This paper studies Mizo, a language spoken in Mizoram, Burma and Bangladesh. It is a tonal language with at least 4 tones: high, low, rising and falling. Although there are some studies on the tonality of Mizo, there is no machine-based analysis its tonality. Priyankoo reported on using a speech analysis tool called PRAAT to analyze Mizo. Priyankoo performed measurements of pitch values at the point of initiation and the point of termination for a tone bearing unit in these samples. He then performed other calculations to show the physical properties of the four Mizo tones. It is the first time that such an instrument-based exposition of Mizo has been performed. Using the tonal identification procedures devised in the first part of the paper, Priyankoo later analyzed two- and three-word Mizo compounds using the software. Priyankoo reported interesting observations regarding the change of tone in Mizo word sequences and has proposed techniques to identify tones and tone changes in Mizo.
Priyankoo presented the paper "An Optimality Theory Analysis of the Tonal Phenomena of Bodo" at the Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology in November 2005 held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Bodo is a Tibeto-Burman tone language spoken in Northeast India, Bangladesh and Nepal. It was not considered a tonal language till recently. Priyankoo in his M.Phil. dissertation in Hyderabad claimed that Bodo has two tones: high and low. The words in Bodo have an unusual tone pattern compared to many other tonal languages. Optimality theory is a recent linguistic model that has come out of Rutgers University in New Jersey. It has been very influential in explaining linguistic issues that lacked good explanation. It has been applied to logically explain various linguistic phenomena including those in syntax, semantics, morphology and phonology. An expression in a language (say, a phrase or a sentence) is considered to have an internal representation of what needs to be said, in our brains. It also has a surface representation, which is the actual phrase or sentence we actually say or write. The manner in which the internal representation is transformed into the surface form requires brain processes that are called generative. There are many constraints this generative process has to satisfy to form grammatical surface forms. OT maintains that among the various potential surface forms, one that violates the constraints the least wins; the winner is the one that is spoken or written. Priyankoo, in this paper, tries to explain the tonal phenomena of Bodo in terms of OT. He also explains how tones and morphology interact with each other in Bodo.
Presently, Priyankoo is in the process of conducting a pitch perception experiment on Chinese and American English speakers. He has also finished collecting English speech data from native speakers of Thai for a study where he and his colleagues will look into properties of English spoken by Thai speakers.
- by Jugal Kalita, Colorado Springs, CO
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