Hargus, Sharon
Invited. Sat PM
Phonetic vs. phonological rounding in Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan languages differ in the timing of the lip rounding gesture of round
vowel phonemes with respect to neighboring consonants.
Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language spoken in western Alaska, has a
phonological phenomenon of Rounding Assimilation, whereby the contrast between two
reduced vowels, /ə/ and /U/, is neutralized as /U/ before a round vowel when a single
uvular or laryngeal consonant intervenes. Rounding Assimilation has not been noted by
previous Deg Xinag field linguists.
Babine-Witsuwit’en, an Athabaskan language spoken in northern British
Columbia, has consonant contrasts at uvular and laryngeal places of articulation similar
to those of Deg Xinag. Babine-Witsuwit’en has a single reduced vowel phoneme /ə/
(lacking /U/) but has rounding contrasts among dorsal consonants. Babine-Witsuwit’en
does not exhibit any assimilation in rounding across uvulars, nor is there rounding
assimilation before inter-vocalic labio-velar stops. However, for syllable-final labiovelars preceded by reduced vowel, the rounding of the consonant is realized on the
preceding vowel: /əkw/ = [ɔ̆kw].
Quantitative acoustic data is presented to substantiate these claims. Qualitative
video evidence is also presented showing that in Deg Xinag there is anticipatory rounding
in the syllable preceding round vowels /o U/ (across single uvular or laryngeal
consonants), whereas in Babine-Witsuwit’en the rounding gesture is strictly timed with
the vowel phonemes (/o u/) from which it originates.
This diversity in the timing of the rounding gesture in the languages of the family
is related to how rounding contrasts have changed over time among the Athabaskan
languages. In Proto-Athabaskan (PA), there is some uncertainty over whether rounding
is to be reconstructed as part of the consonant system or the reduced vowel system. PA is
reconstructed with a contrast between *ə and *U, but at a remoter phonological level PA
*QU is equivalent to *Qwə and PA *UQ is equivalent to *əQw, the latter much like
synchronic Babine-Witsuwit’en. A scenario for historical change is posited, whereby PA
*QU > *UQU > UQ{U,o}. [work supported by NSF]
31