The Tonal Comparative Method: Tracing Sound Change in Lexical Tone Rikker Dockum The Comparative Method We can deconstruct the Comparative Method to first principles and rebuild it in a way that allows for tonal evidence What do sound change rules like this pick out from the language? *p > b / V_V o The object of comparison in the CM is lexical subsets that pattern together in a particular conditioning environment o When viewed in this way, lexical tones with their segmental origins are a natural fit Building the missing evidence Expanding the Comparative Method SUMMARY: Linking tones to their segmental origins helps us to use tonal evidence in language classification and reconstruction in a methodologically sound way Lexical tone and the Comparative Method The Kra-Dai languages o ~100 languages o ~100 million speakers (Edmondson & Solnit 2008) Tai is the most populous branch o ~80 million speakers o Thailand 65+ million o China 15+ million o Laos 4+ million o Myanmar 3+ million o And more in India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia o The Comparative Method has long been the main tool of linguists for figuring out what past stages of a language sounded like without direct evidence o Systematic comparison of cognate words in related languages o Working backwards from the present and inferring sound changes in daughter languages o The main tool of linguists for determining genetic relationships between languages, and reconstructing common ancestors (i.e. proto-languages) The segmental origins of tone o Lexical tone, the use of pitch to encode word meanings, has often been thought to be unusable with the Comparative Method (e.g. Meillet 1948, Campbell 2003) o The origin of tone compensates for loss of segmental contrasts o But after initial tonogenesis, tones vary and change in ways still poorly understood Why do tones change? o Sound change is constantly happening o Both conditioned changes and random drift, just as with segments “[past use of Tai tonal evidence] is not consistent with the shared-innovation method used in subgrouping, because many tonal changes may not in fact be shared innovations … A subgrouping proposal for Southwestern Tai should primarily use as criteria consonantal and vocalic changes that can be shown empirically to have occurred relatively early.” (Pittayaporn 2013:306) What is missing? o In the traditional Comparative Method we have a large body of accumulated knowledge, the received wisdom of what kinds of sound changes are more or less likely than others o Key to the scientific validity of the method is having generally reproducible principles for distinguishing retentions and innovations from chance resemblance (Weiss 2015) o There is no body of received wisdom for sound change in lexical tone, no accumulated knowledge of which sound changes are more or less likely “…prosodic change seems fully tractable in terms of analytical methods ... time-tried for other aspects of phonological change … on the other hand, there is as yet so much to be learned … the present lack of data may enforce, at a minimum … one or two generations of waiting until two or more richly described contiguous points in time are available for comparison” (Janda and Joseph 2003:117) Tone in the Tai languages Proto-Tai had three tones on open syllables/sonorant codas: A B C *hmaA ‘dog’ *hmaB ‘to soak’ *hmaC ‘to grow, rise’ The 3-tone system of Proto-Tai split into more tones based on the laryngeal configuration of onset consonants: Each daughter language carves up the ‘tone box’ (Gedney 1972) differently. For example, here is Standard Thai (each color represents a surface tone): A B C Voiceless w/ friction A1 B1 C1 *pʰ, *tʰ, *s, *ʰm, etc. Voiceless unaspirated A2 B2 C2 *p, *t, *k, etc. Glottalized A3 B3 C3 *ʔ, *ʔb, *ʔj, etc. Voiced A4 B4 C4 *b, *m, *l, *z, etc. A B C Voiceless w/ friction khaː24 ‘leg’ khaː22 ‘galangal’ khaː41 ‘servant’ *pʰ, *tʰ, *s, *ʰm, etc. Voiceless unaspirated ka33 ‘crow’ kaj22 ‘chicken’ klaː41 ‘seedling’ *p, *t, *k,