Glottal stops and glottalised tones

[Richard W]

I am trying to present the pronunciation of words in Northern Thai dialects. The convention being used for Thai , which is closely related, is that glottal stops are not shown, as their presence is predictable. The dialects have syllabic tone - at least a 6-way contrast, though a 4-way contrast on checked syllables might not map into the 6-way contrast on unchecked syllables. The programme also likes to use tone letters, with diacritics as an alternative. However, there is the complication that glottalisation is a significant feature of some tones on unchecked syllables, while the final consonant of a checked syllable may be a glottal stop. Such a final glottal stop apparently guarantees that the vowel is short.

What are the sane and aesthetically tolerable ways of notating such a system?

It seems likely that the rimes can be expressed in the form V(ː)(ʔ)(C)T, where the position of the glottal stop (and its presence) depends on the coda consonant C and tone T, which latter is a pure pitch contour. However, it appears that field linguists are not very good at noticing the glottalisation, so glottalisation and final glottal stop might not be unifiable as my rime structure would imply. I am not trained to perceive tones well or in coaxing information out of informants.

[bradrn]

Could you give some examples please?

[Richard W]

Could you give some examples please?

Trawling through a dictionary, which when it gives pronunciations resorts to respelling in the Thai script, I can find, with tones omitted from phonemic transcriptions:

ᨠᩯᩡ /kɛʔ/ 'sheep' (translit แกะ) whose tone is described as 'rising tone', though the New Testament systematically doesn't mark it as such, presumably because it's quite different from the 'rising tone' on unchecked syllables. Many teaching books do mark it with the Siamese notation for rising tone. The Thai amplifies it to 'rising-short'. This tone is used for the three Gedney box cells D1S, D2S and D3S.

ᨠᩯ /kɛː/ (translit แก)(Possibly 'caw' - I have trouble understanding the meanings given in the dictionary.) Tone is described as 'rising tone'. with the Thai amplifying it to 'rising-long'. This tone is used for the two Gedney box cells A1 and A2.

ᨠᩯ᩵ /kɛː/ (translit แก่) 'very old', whose tone is described as 'low tone'. This tone is used for the three Gedney box cells B1, B2 and B3. The dictionary doesn't say which tone is used for cell D1L; I would expect it to be this one for the Chiang Mai dialect.

ᨠᩯ᩶ /kɛː/ (translit แก้) (I can't translate the gloss), whose tone is described as 'high falling' and further described in Thai as half tone 3, half tone 2, which tones are commonly described as 'high' and 'falling'. There is a glottal stop (or something similar) between the two halves, and the second half is short to absent - it seems to have been getting shorter during the 20th century. This tone is used for the three Gedney box cells C1, C2 and C3.

The first tone of these four tones is restricted to checked syllables, i.e. those ending in /ʔ/, /k/, /t/ or /p/.

The next three tones are found on unchecked syllables, e.g. the triplets ᨠᩯ᩠ᩅ /kɛːŋ/ 'curry' (translit แก่ง), ᨠᩯ᩠᩵ᨦ /kɛːŋ‌/ (translit แก่ง), ᨠᩯ᩠᩶ᨦ /kɛːŋ‌/ (translit แก้ง) 'to cleanse' and ᨠᩥ᩠ᨶ /kin‌/ (translit กิน) 'to eat', ᨠᩥ᩠᩵ᨶ /kin‌/ (translit กิ่น) 'to smell', ᨠᩥ᩠᩶ᨶ /kin‌/ (translit กิ้น) 'cropped (of hair)'. (Statistically, vowel length and quality are correlated.) Both short and long vowels can occur before final /k/, /t/ or /p/, but they are different sets of tones. In regularly developed inherited vocabulary, there are two tones for short vowels, and two different tones for long vowels, but some words fall outside the (Gedney) box. Incidentally, final /k/, /t/ and /p/ are probably preglottalised as in British English, except that the stops themselves are probably unreleased.

There is another set of tones, with similar distribution constraints, but I can't give a full set of minimal pairs. A reasonable approximation goes:

ᨣᩯᩡ /kɛʔ‌/ (translit แคะ) (Can't translate) whose tone is described as 'high tone', of a variety further described in Thai as 'high-falling'. It is not the same as the 'high falling' tone above. This tone is used for the Gedney box cell D4S.

ᨣᩯ /kɛː/ (translit แค) 'Sesbania grandiflora' Its tone is described as 'mid tone'. This tone is used for the two Gedney box cells A3 and A4.

ᨣᩯ᩠᩵ᩅ /kɛːw‌/ (translit แค่ว) 'to bestow'. Its tone is described as 'falling tone'. This tone is used for the Gedney box cells B4 and D4L.

ᨣᩯ᩠᩶ᩅ /kɛːw/ (translit แค้ว) 'to avoid'. Its tone is described as 'high tone', with a further clarification in Thai to 'high-long'. This tone is used for the Gedney box cell C4. There are accounts that this tone is also 'glottalised'.

[Richard W]

I forgot that I had collated pitch contours of 4 accents at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktiona ... Diatonemes. They must be taken from Katsura, Makio (1969 September) “Notes on Some Phonological Aspects of Northern Thai”, in Tonan Ajia Kenkyu (The Southeast Asian Studies)‎, volume 7, number 2, pages 148–162, available at https://kyoto-seas.org/pdf/7/2/070201.pdf. On p10 of the PDF (journal page157) he gives pitch contour diacritics, but even if they are all in Unicode (not yet checked), they're not very legible.