From Proto-Chamic to Tsat: Insights from Zheng 1997 and from Summer 2004 fieldwork
Graham Thurgood and Ela Thurgood
April 29, 2005
Taylor 210, CSU Chico

    This paper on Hainan Cham, that is, Tsat, does two things: based on the Zheng 1997 grammar, it clarifies the details about the reflexes of Proto-Chamic in Hainan Cham and based on the instrumental work on the language by Ela and Graham Thurgood it provides a much richer phonetic picture, not only of the synchronic tone system, but also on the diachronic patterns of change.
     G. Thurgood (1999) provides a preliminary phonological and lexical reconstruction of Proto-Chamic [PC], the branch of Austronesian belonging to the Chamic branch of Malayo-Chamic, a group of Austronesian languages that includes the Acehnese of Sumatra, the Western Cham of parts of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, along with a number of languages of Vietnam (Northern Roglai, Cac Gia Roglai, Southern Roglai, Rade, Jarai, Haroi, Eastern Cham (=Phan Rang Cham), and Chru)). While the reconstruction of PC in Thurgood 1999 maps out correspondences between PC and the descendant Chamic languages for the majority of the languages, the reflex patterns in Tsat are sketchy, reflecting the lack of data. The 1999 analysis was based on the information available at the time (Ouyang and Zheng, 1983; Ni, 1988ab, 1990ab; and Zheng 1986), and it did not include Zheng 1997—a sizeable grammar of Tsat.

     Aside from providing a database to confirm the then speculative conclusions about the reflexes of PC in Tsat, which had been based on the earlier limited database, the two new sources provide considerable insights into Tsat (Hainan Cham) tonogenesis: in fact, the summer 2004 instrumental fieldwork combined with the enlarged database in Zheng 1997 allow us to provide a phonetically much richer and more complex picture of the tonogenesis, one consistent with various accounts of Tsat tonogenesis found in the literature (Benedict 1984, Haudricourt 1984, Ni 1990a, Maddieson and Pang, 1993, Thurgood 1993, 1996, 1999) and still transparent but more complex and thus more insightful. Specifically, some of these developments suggest that the widely attested differential behavior of final glottal stops in tonogenesis—sometimes a final glottal stop causes the pitch to rise and at other times it causes the pitch to fall—is more likely to be attributed to the fact that sometimes the glottal final occurs as part of a co-articulated coda, in which cases the pitch falls, and at others it is part of a co-articulated final, in which case the pitch rises.
     In addition, there are a number of general comments about the phonetic details of pitch patterns of what phonemically is treated by Zheng as the same tone: there is variation in the so-called 11 tone, in the 55 tone, in the 33 tone, and so on. a number of changes are reflected in our summer 2004 data, changes that have occurred since the Zheng and Ouyang data was collected in the mid 1980s (despite often later publication dates). The time frame for these changes parallels the time frames for change in Nadou and Jiamao, two other Tai-Kadai languages of Hainan, which we also collected data on.
    Finally, there is another change in progress is of some interest: The PC *-ay > *-a:y÷ > (variably) -a:÷ is fairly well-attested in the data, along with a more marginally but fully parallel *-aw > *-a:w÷ > (variably) -a:÷.

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