On word-final voicing contrasts in Nilotic and beyond ...

On word-final voicing contrasts in Nilotic and beyond

Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

1. Introduction It has been claimed by a number of authors that cross-linguistically word-final stops are typically devoiced or inherently voiceless. This claim is investigated in the present contribution on the basis of data from Nilotic and other Eastern Sudanic groups. As shown below, voicing contrasts in word-final position are in fact fairly common in languages belonging to this branch of Nilo-Saharan. Historical-comparative evidence suggests that such voicing contrasts tend to emerge from consonant alternation, in particular involving gemination, as well as from wordfinal vowel loss. The question of whether Eastern Sudanic languages are “marked” or unusual in this respect from a typological point of view is taken up in the final section.

2. The voicing contrast in Nilotic from a typological point of view The comparative method, as applied originally to the study of Indo-European languages, has also been applied successfully to African language families where sufficient cognate lexemes can be identified in order to identify regular sound correspondences. This applies to Bantu, Eastern Cushitic, Nilotic, and Surmic, to mention but a few. Reconstructions of earlier stages allow one to reconstruct historical sound changes in individual languages or groups of languages, and shared innovations in turn may provide clues about subgrouping. As shown by Vossen (1997), these principles also apply to language families with universally rare sounds, like Central Khoisan, where clicks are common. Languages apparently go through cycles historically, in that abutting non-identical consonants may develop into geminates, which in turn may be simplified into single consonants. The latter may become subject to lenition, and either disappear or change into vowels. The same historical process may be reiterated once vowels between consonants are deleted, thereby resulting in consonant adjacency. Historical-comparative research over the past decades has also resulted in the formulation of so-called “sonority hierarchies”, whereby consonants occur on a scale expressing increasing consonant strength (in one direction) or increasing sonority (in the other direction). There is, for example, a cross-linguistic preference

for sonorants in syllable-final position, whereas no such preference can be observed for syllable-initial positions. See Dimmendaal (2011: 23-58) for an illustration of these phenomena. Along similar lines, it has been suggested that certain phonetic contrasts are more common in certain parts of the word, for example word-finally. Blevins (2006: 118) claims, with respect to the distribution of consonants, that in all languages with a voicing contrast this contrast is found before vowels, while in many languages with a voicing contrast this contrast is not found at the end of words; see also Blevins (2004) for a survey of presumed restrictions on the distribution of certain contrasts in languages. It is a well-known fact that some language families typically avoid consonant-final words (except in ideophones), as is true for Proto-Bantu and many of its descendants. Such patterns can also be observed for other language families. Blust (2013: 214), in his detailed historical-comparative study of the Austronesian language family, points out that disyllabic words ending in a consonant are common in members of this family, and that this template can in fact be reconstructed for their common ancestor. Nevertheless, there were also limitations on the distribution of consonants in Proto-Austronesian. As stated by the same author, one of the most striking phonotactic differences among Austronesian languages is seen in the range of permissible final consonants: “…final *b and *g are rare … and *k and *ŋ are extremely frequent in final position” (Blust 2013: 220). When studying Nilotic, one also gets the impression that certain consonants in specific languages have a “defective” distribution. In his detailed historical-comparative study of Eastern Nilotic (one of the three primary branches of Nilotic), Vossen (1982: 96-99) also reconstructs an original contrast between voiceless and voiced obstruents in root-initial position, but only voiceless consonants in word-final position. More specifically, the following consonants are reconstructed for Proto-Eastern Nilotic: *p, *t, *tt, *ty, *k, *b, *d, *dy, *g, *l, *r, *rr, *m, *n, *ɲ, *ŋ, *w, and *y. In addition, a number of clusters are reconstructed by Vossen (1983): *ku, *gw, *ly, *rdy. Dimmendaal (1984) suggests that the clusters reconstructed for Proto-Eastern Nilotic are better analysed as sequences of phonemes rather than as complex units. In the same contribution, it is argued that Proto-Eastern Nilotic probably had a fricative *s, a set of implosives: *ɓ, *ɗ, and *’y, as well as a marginal phoneme *q, which structurally probably filled the velar slot for the voiced implosive set (*ɠ). Vossen (1982: 315-322) shows that Eastern Nilotic can be divided, on the basis of a range of phonological, grammatical and lexical

innovations, into two primary branches: the Bari group or branch and the Non-Bari group (also referred to as the Lotuxo-Maa-Teso-Turkana branch).

Eastern Nilotic

Non-Bari group

Bari group

Lotuxo-Maa

Teso-Turkana

Figure 1 The subclassification of Eastern Nilotic

As shown by Vossen (1982), there is no evidence for a voicing contrast in root-final or wordfinal position in Proto-Eastern Nilotic, a distributional property that is retained unaltered in the Bari group. Nevertheless, contrasts between voiced and voiceless stops are common in the NonBari branch (or the Lotuxo-Maa-Teso-Turkana branch). There is historical-comparative evidence that the forms with word-final voiced stops in the Non-Bari languages emerged from consonant alternation through rephonologisation. Compare the following cognate verbs and their corresponding transitive and detransitivised forms in Bari, as a member of the Bari group, and Turkana, as a member of the Non-Bari group:

Bari

(1)

transitive

intransitive

tup

tubbo

‘divide’

lɔt

lɔddya

‘join’

-tub

-tub-o

‘cut, cleave’

-lɔd

-lɔd-a

‘intertwine, tie around’

Turkana (2)

Gemination disappeared as a distinctive feature in the Non-Bari group, except in the Lotuxo cluster, which borders on the region where languages belonging to the Bari group are spoken, while Maa retained geminate glides. The alternations between transitive and intransitive verb forms in Bari and Turkana suggest that, once geminate consonants had been reduced to single consonants in the Non-Bari group, and once consonant alternation had disappeared as well, the corresponding non-derived (transitive) form was reinterpreted (through back-formation) as a root ending in a voiced consonant. The other source for word-final voiced stops in the Non-Bari group is the loss of wordfinal vowels, as a result of which intervocalic voiced stops became word-final.

Bari (3)

Turkana

ŋɛdɛ

‘cut out/ off a little’

-ŋɛd

‘cut, decamp’

rɪɗɪ

‘compress’

-rɪd

‘pinch, hold tightly’

The cognate forms in Maasai (Lotuxo-Maa group; data adapted from Payne and Ole-Kotikash 2005) in example (4) strongly suggest that the loss of these final vowels and the maintenance of voicing in the preceding stop was a shared innovation of languages belonging to the NonBari group.

(4)

-ŋád

‘separate one thing from another with force’

-rrɪ́d

‘tie, cover up with strings, pack by tying onto something’

Note that the structural contrast between voiced plosives and implosives was retained in the Bari group, but lost in the Non-Bari group (Dimmendaal 1984); hence, the word-final plosive in the verbal root -rɪd, in Non-Bari languages like Maa, is a regular reflex of the original alveolar implosive (which was retained unaltered in the Bari group). In verbs not alternating between transitive and intransitive argument structures, final voiceless stops remained voiceless, as in the root ‘blow’, -kʊt in Bari as well as in Turkana (reconstructed as *- kʊt by Vossen 1982: 335). The other cognate verb roots discussed above in (1) and (2) do not appear to have cognates in Lotuxo-Maa, and consequently no observations can be made on shared innovations in the Non-Bari group here. Dimmendaal (1988) reconstructs a three-way voicing contrast between voiced implosives, voiced plosives, and voiceless stops for Proto-Nilotic, as illustrated by the following examples:

(5)

*yɪt̪

‘ooze’

*gɪd

‘itch, tickle’

*sʊɗ

‘rub’

The situation for Western Nilotic, the second primary branch of Nilotic, alongside Eastern Nilotic and Southern Nilotic, is less clear, as a comparative study of the size and depth of Vossen (1982) is still lacking. Reh (1985) reconstructs a voicing contrast for stops in ProtoWestern Nilotic, but the comparative evidence for a word-final contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants in Proto-Western Nilotic is inconclusive, although a number of Western Nilotic languages, such as Alur and Luwo, do have this contrast. Our understanding of the historical development of Nilotic languages has improved considerably as a result of the historical-comparative study of the third primary branch of Nilotic, Southern Nilotic, by Rottland (1982), who reconstructs a set of voiceless, but no voiced stops, for Proto-Southern Nilotic: *p, *t, *c, *k, *l, *L, *r, *R, *s, *m, *n, *ɲ, *ŋ, *y, *w. When taking as a basis the voicing contrast for word-initial and word-medial stops in Proto-Nilotic as reconstructed in Dimmendaal (1988), the conclusion has to be that Southern Nilotic languages developed in the opposite direction by losing voicing distinctions as a distinctive phonological feature. Hence, Proto-Nilotic *gɪd ‘itch, tickle’ has the following reflex in Nandi (Creider and Creider 2001: 142):

(6)

-kitkìt

‘tickle’

Intervocalically, the root-initial velar stop is realised as a voiced stop in Nandi (ke-gitkit; Creider and Creider 2001: 142). Neither voicing nor glottalisation appears to be distinctive in modern Southern Nilotic languages, with the exception of Päkoot, like Nandi a member of the Kalenjin cluster, which distinguishes between plosive and implosive alveolar stops (d versus ɗ). Some Kalenjin lects have voiced obstruents intervocalically as allophones of the voiceless consonants. These voiced allophones are sometimes subject to lenition (b alternating with β; g alternating with ɣ), as illustrated for Nandi below.

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kɛɛ-pɪr 

[kɛɛbɪr, kɛɛβɪr]

‘to beat’

kɛɛ-kɛr 

[kɛɛ-gɛr, kɛɛɣɛr]

‘to shut’

The neutralisation of phonological distinctions between [+voiced] and [-voiced] (nonglottalised) consonants in Kalenjin is an areal feature shared with neighbouring Bantu languages, and may in fact have emerged through bilingualism, as argued in Dimmendaal (1996).1 For Datooga, Rottland (1982: 153) gives a full series of voiced stops (b, d, j, g) which occur after a nasal, whereas in other consonant clusters these stops are most often voiceless (Rottland 1982: 154). But as noted by Rottland (1982: 156), they alternate with their voiceless counterparts root-initially and root-finally, in sometimes unpredictable conditions. Consequently, voicing distinctions in Datooga may not be entirely predictable synchronically.

3. Other Eastern Sudanic branches. Systems without any word-final voicing contrast, as reconstructed for some subgroups within Nilotic, cannot simply be taken as the cross-linguistically unmarked situation. As illustrated below, voicing contrasts are common elsewhere in Eastern Sudanic, the branch of Nilo-Saharan to which Nilotic belongs. Eastern Sudanic is usually divided into a Northern and a Southern subgroup. The closest relative of Nilotic, Surmic, consists of a Southern branch and a Northern branch, the latter containing one language, Majang. Southern Surmic languages have been studied from a historical-comparative point of view by Yigezu (2002), who reconstructs a voicing contrast for stops in Proto-Southern Surmic; however, no roots are reconstructed attesting to such a contrast word-finally.

1

At the same time, it should be pointed out that such voicing rules are not very typical for Bantu languages in general either.

Taman Meroitic (extinct) Northern

Nubian Nara Nyimang

Eastern Sudanic

Jebel Berta Southern Daju Temeinian Surmic

Nilotic Figure 2. The subclassification of Eastern Sudanic

No restrictions on voicing occur in Majang, i.e. in Northern Surmic, which allows wordfinal voiced plosives, as well as implosives (these latter consonants do not occur in Southern Surmic). The following data are from Yigezu (2002):

(8)

ámɗ

‘belly’

ŋaaj

‘liver’

Voiced stops in word-final position are also common in another member of the Southern branch of Eastern Sudanic, Daju. In one member of the Daju cluster, Daju of Eref, word-final voiceless and voiced geminate consonants occur (data from Palayer 2011):

(9)

pakk

‘break’

sog

‘do, make’

kaabidd

‘pick up’

Consonant alternation accompanying morphological processes appears to constitute one source for the occurrence of word-final voiced geminate consonants in Daju of Eref; for example, when the verbal base ends in a voiced alveolar stop, a suffix -d (expressing a verbal noun) is added: jamud -d  jamudd ‘age, grow old’ (Palayer 2011: 87). As with the Non-Bari group in Eastern Nilotic discussed above, final vowel loss appears to form a second source for voiced geminate and simple consonants in word-final position in the Daju branch within Eastern Nilotic, for example in Liguri. Compare the following cognates (data from Thelwall 1981).

(10)

Liguri

Nyala

muuj

mide

‘fat (noun)’.

In Gaahmg, the only member of the Jebel branch within Eastern Sudanic still spoken today, word-final voicing contrasts for stops are again common. Stirtz (2011: 28-29) points out that voiceless plosives surface at the beginnings of words, but not in other environments, and that voiced plosives surface at the beginnings of words and in consonant sequences. “When the plosives [b], [ɉ ] and [g] surface in intervocalic and word-final position, they are underlyingly geminate even though they surface with little or no contrastive length. If they were not geminate, they would be weakened to approximants and vowels in these environ-ments. They are realized as single, devoiced unreleased plosives word-finally, and are realized with little or no length intervocally” (Stirtz 2011: 28).

(11)

dāggár

[dāgár]

‘tortoise’

gàágg

[gàág˳˺]

‘bird type‘

The other two voiced plosives (/d̪/ and /d/) never surface with contrastive length and are not weakened intervocalically or word-finally in Gaahmg.

(12)

dɔd

[dɔd˳]

‘bird type’

Again, the alternations for consonants other than the dental or alveolar stop in Gaahmg are reminiscent of the emergence of a voicing contrast word-finally in Daju and Nilotic. Berta, which forms a coordinate branch with Gaahm (Bremer 2015), seems to prefer open syllables and sonorants word-finally, but examples with final voiced stops nevertheless occur; examples from Bremer (2015) are borid ‘lion’ and dzab ‘good’. Voiced stops appear to be absent word-finally in the fifth subgroup of the Southern branch of Eastern Sudanic, Temeinian, which consists of Temein, Keiga Jirru, and Tese. But again, voicing contrasts are attested in the Northern subgroup of Eastern Sudanic. In Nubian languages, for example, word-final stops can be voiced or voiceless, as illustrated by the following examples from Karko (Jakobi, to appear).

(13)

êgêd

‘goat’

gêj

‘husband’

häg

‘water-storing pot’

Jakobi (to appear) reconstructs a phonological contrast between voiceless and voiced stops for Proto-Kordofan Nubian, the Nubian subgroup to which Karko belongs, but points out that the word-final position is restricted to voiced obstruents, nasals, and the liquids *l and *r. Voiced obstruents in final position were apparently relatively rare, *j being the most frequent among them, and *g being attested in one set of cognates only (Jakobi, to appear). In Nara, which also belongs to the Northern branch within Eastern Sudanic, voiced stops again are not uncommon word-finally (data from Elnur 2016).

(14)

hog

‘leg’

balaj

‘lightening’

atab

‘(s)he, they’

Similarly, in Afitti and Nyimang, two languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains in Sudan, which are also part of the Northern branch within Eastern Sudanic, voiced word-final stops are not uncommon. This situation contrasts with that found in the Taman languages, which also belong to the Northern branch of Eastern Sudanic but which do not seem to have word-final voiced stops. The Taman languages are spoken mainly in the border area between Chad and Western Sudan.

Other Nilo-Saharan subgroups in this area, as well as in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, do not show voicing contrasts for wordfinal stops either. The only exception to this generalisation about areal types is formed by the Daju group, where such voicing distinctions are (still) common, as illustrated above. Geographically, Daju is a southwestern outlier of the Southern branch of Eastern Sudanic (see Map 1), presumably resulting from a more recent migration into the western zones of the NiloSaharan

area.

4. Word-final voicing in a cross-linguistic perspective Indo-European languages also differ as to whether they do or do not distinguish between voiced and voiceless word-final stops, for example in the Germanic branch. The common view of Indo-

Europeanists is that Proto-Germanic single consonants (except for *r), followed by a liquid or nasal, became geminate consonants in West Germanic when preceded by an accented short vowel. This rule, which has come to be known as West Germanic Gemination (Lass 1994 35), and which resulted from preferred syllable structures, affected the end of a root syllable (converting an “overlight” syllable to a heavy one). Consequently, a Proto-Germanic root like *bidjaną became *biddyan in West Germanic and, subsequently, *biddan in Old English (Lass 1996: 157), with a reflex bid in Modern English; see Lass (1996: 28, 35, ad passim) for further details. Hence, the contrast between word-final voiced and voiceless stops in modern English is due historically to the emergence of an intervocalic contrast between geminate voiced and voiceless consonants on the one hand and corresponding single ones on the other, and the subsequent loss of following segments. These historical changes are of course reminiscent of historical phonological changes resulting in a word-final voicing distinction for stops, as described for Eastern Sudanic languages above. Old High German retained the gemination rule and consequently distinguished between long stops (*pp, *bb, *tt, *dd, *ck *kk, *gg) and corresponding short stops. The standard view on the phonology of modern German is that when these voiced stops occur word-finally, voicing is lost phonetically and the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops is neutralised. But a recent study by a group of phoneticians (Röttger et al. 2014) has shown that even in (Standard) German there is still a phonetic contrast between the two types of stops in word-final position. This in turn shows that only instrumental-phonetic research can provide a final answer to the question of whether absolute neutralisation of voicing distinctions occurs in other languages for which this has been claimed. So how do we decide which situation is more or less marked from a typological point of view? Obviously, a mere statistical counting of the number of languages making a voicing distinction for final stops as against those that do not is not very telling in itself, as this is a coincidental artefact of the linguistic history of an area: the spreading of certain languages and the disappearance of others. As pointed out by Haspelmath (2006), the notion of “markedness” has been used in various ways by different authors, and applying it is often problematic. He further argues that it should be replaced by the notion of “frequency of usage”, a position strongly subscribed to in the present contribution. Whether a particular feature is marked depends primarily on where a specific language is spoken. Voicing distinctions for word-final stops are common in the eastern zones of the Nilo-Saharan family (Sudan, Ethiopia, the eastern zones of South Sudan, as well as in Kenya and Tanzania), but not elsewhere within this phylum, as we saw above.

A comparison with Afroasiatic languages in the area, in particular those spoken in Ethiopia, shows that voicing distinctions for word-final stops are common. Moreover, consonant alternation accompanying suffixation processes (or as instances of internal morphology) are also common in both Omotic and Cushitic languages in Ethiopia. For reasons of space, only a few examples from one Omotic language, Dime, can be given here (data from Seyoum 2007: 62; M in the interlinear glossing refers to “masculine”).

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ʔehe

ček’ub

‘small house’

house small-M

(15)

ʔeh-af

če-ček’id

house-PL

small-M

‘small houses’

The genetic and areal distribution of another phonological property of specific Nilotic languages, namely implosion as a distinctive feature of stops, suggests that patterns of multilingualism and areal contact play a central role in the historical stability of phonetic features. Implosive stops, for example, occur in cognate roots in the Eastern Nilotic Bari group, Western Nilotic Alur, and in Southern Nilotic Päkoot (Dimmendaal 1996). All of these are spoken in areas where neighbouring languages (namely Central Sudanic and Kuliak languages) also have implosive stops. Consequently, implosive stops must have been lost independently in the remaining Eastern, Southern and Western Nilotic languages. Bilingualism is apparently a major factor determining the stability or instability of sounds, as argued in Dimmendaal (1996). The more general explanation for the relative stability or instability of specific phonological – but also morphological and syntactic – features is presumably frequency of usage. This latter feature may have a language-internal motivation, but parallel structures in neighbouring languages and contact with their speakers is another determining factor, as the following morphosyntactic feature may show. As argued in Dimmendaal (2000), the widespread tripartite number-marking system between singulatives, plurals, and a replacement pattern in Nilo-Saharan manifests a remarkable stability, except in areas where such languages border on typologically different languages. Singulative marking in Nilo-Saharan languages occurs primarily with nouns that are used more frequently in the plural. But this latter system disappeared in languages spoken in areas where neighbouring but genetically unrelated languages do not have such systems (see Dimmendaal 2000 for further details).

The more general conclusion to be drawn from the phenomena discussed in the present contribution is that frequency of usage, as governed by language-internal factors as well as external factors such as contact situations, is and should remain a core notion in our understanding and explanation of language change.

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