Campbell: Tone Change in Chatino

Do Tones Change Faster than Segments? Perspectives from Recent Documentation of the Chatino Languages (Zapotecan, Mexico)

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Speaker

Eric Campbell

Abstract

Linguists have noted that tones are the “first” (Josserand 1983:243) or “most salient” (Morey 2005:146) features to vary across related languages, and they “tend to change rapidly and in unexpected ways” (Ratliff 2015:249). Does this mean that tones change faster than segments? If so, why? This paper explores these questions by comparing four recently documented endangered or understudied Chatino varieties: Zenzontepec (Campbell 2014), Tataltepec (Sullivant 2015), Zacatepec (Villard 2015), and Quiahije (Cruz 2011).

Monosyllabification has precipitated recent consonantal changes in Quiahije and Tataltepec, but otherwise a relative paucity of segmental changes across Chatino varieties suggests shallow diversification (Campbell 2013). Segmental correspondences are phonetically close (Table 1, shaded), but tonal correspondences less so.

Table 1. Chatino cognates and reconstructions gloss

	Zenzontepec	Tataltepec	Zacatepec	Quiahije	proto–Chatino
‘salt’	teheʔ Ø	theʔ Ø	tiheʔ Ø	theʔ Ø	*teheʔ Ø
‘copal incense’	jánā HM	janá H	jānã́ MH	jna H	janá H
‘jaguar’	kʷītʃí MH	kʷtʃí H	kʷitʃǐ L͡H	ktʃi M͡H	kʷìtsí LH
‘ant’	kʷitʲeeʔ Ø	kʷtʲeèʔ L	kʷitʲēēʔ MM	kʷtʲeʔ L͡H	kʷi-tèèʔ LL
‘arm of’	ʃikȭ M	skõ̀ L	sikȭ MH	skõ MH	sikõ̀ L
‘six’	súkʷa HØ	skʷa Ø	sukʷa Ø	skʷa M͡L	súkʷa HL
‘night’	telā M	H̋talʲà H̋L	tilàLH̋ LLH̋	tla H͡LH̋	(Htelà) HL?
‘raw’	jéʔē HM	jeʔe H͡L	jaʔa Ø	jʔa Ø	(*jaʔa) ?

Proto-Chatino (based on Campbell & Woodbury 2010) contrasted *H vs. *L vs. Ø. Most words were bimoraic, and tones linked to morae one-to-one from the end of the word. *H was culminative (max. one H per word). Thus there were six tonal melodies on simplex bimoraic words (rightmost column of Table 1) that display regular correspondences in their reflexes. However, there are many irregular correspondences as well (last two rows of the table), for which tone cannot yet be confidently reconstructed (pCh words in parentheses).

While the modern varieties maintain privativity (Ø) and H culminativity, their tone systems have diverged significantly in terms of inventory, distribution, and processes, as shown in Table 2 (H̋ = extra-high).

Table 2. Some features of some Chatino tone systems

	Zenzontepec	Tataltepec	Zacatepec	Quiahije
Inventory of tonal contrasts on the mora	H, M, Ø	H, L, Ø, H̋, H͡L	H, M, L, Ø, L͡H, L͡H̋	H, M, L, H̋, Ø, M͡H̋, M͡H, L͡M, L͡H, H͡L, M͡L
# of tonal melodies on the word	7	8	15	15
Floating tones	―	H̋	H, L, L͡H̋	H, H̋, M͡H
Tones that spread	H	H, L	H, H̋	―

Some mechanisms that have propelled such diversification are illustrated in Table 3. The perfective form of ‘cry’ (a) displays regular reflexes of pCh *LH. The potential mood prefix (b) carried a H tone that perturbed the stem tone and yielded various types of floating tones. Such derived melodies then associated with words of other classes in Zacatepec (c) and Quiahije (d), resulting in new lexical tone melodies and three additional tone correspondence sets from pCh *LH. No two varieties group the four forms in a fully corresponding way.

Table 3. Tone change and new tonal correspondence sets

gloss	Zenzontepec	Tataltepec	Zacatepec	Quiahije	proto–Chatino
a. PFV-cry	nkaj-ūná MH	ntj-uná H	nkaj-unǎ L͡H	j-na M͡H	nkaj-ùná LH
b. POT-cry	k-unā M	H̋kunà H̋L	kunàL LL	kna H͡LH̋	(*kH-una)
c. ‘twenty’	kālá MH	kalá H	kalà LL	kla M͡LM͡H	kàlá LH
d. ‘tomato’	nkʷīʃí MH	nkʷʃi̋ H̋	nkʷi̋ʃì` L͡H̋LL	wʃi H͡LH̋	(*nkʷisi)

While tone change has been attributed to loss of laryngeal contrasts (Haudricourt 1954) or reanalysis of secondary parts of a tone’s complex composition as its primary one (Ratliff 2015:254), this paper argues that tone’s autosegmental nature, tonal perturbations via morphology (Donohue 1997:379), and analogy may contribute to tone’s predilection to change. Experimental work on Chinese languages (Cutler & Chen 1997; Sereno & Lee 2015; Weiner & Turnbull 2016) has shown that tones are less crucial for lexical processing than segments, which could open the door for tone to change more rapidly than segments. “Tone can do everything [and more] that segmental and metrical phonology can do” (Hyman 2011: 236), and since tone is not well represented among well-studied and major world languages — at least outside of Asia — tone is a good example of how the study of endangered (and lesser-studied) languages might inform our broader understanding of language change.

References

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