Does Even have ATR? – Testing phonological hypotheses in an endangered language

• Main Authors: Natalia Aralova, Sven Grawunder
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Akan; Tungusic languages
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.296.1491; http://www.cunyphonologyforum.net/ENDANABSTRACTS/AralovaGrawunder.pdf

Even is an endangered Tungusic language described as having a robust system of vowel harmony. In recent decades a [+/- ATR] distinction dividing vowels into two harmonic sets was reported as a major feature of the Tungusic vowel systems. According to Ard (1980), among the Tungusic languages this feature is most salient in Even. However, this claim relies mainly on the description of the literary dialect of the Ola settlement by Novikova (1960), who had suggested pharyngealization as the major distinctive feature in Even vowel harmony. This she illustrated with X-ray still photographs of 11 vowels taken from one speaker. Ard proposed that the distinctive feature of the two vowel sets is triggered by the retraction of the tongue root ([-ATR]) instead of being due to pharyngealization, and consequently interpreted the data as evidence for an ATR-distinction. This feature had previously been described only for languages of Western Africa (e.g. Akan, Yoruba, Igbo, cf. Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996) or Mon-Khmer languages (cf. Gregerson 1976), but Ard’s hypothesis was accepted by a number of authors (cf. Li 1996, Vaux 2009) working on languages of Northeast Asia. However, no further acoustic or articulatory data were presented for Even that would justify such a claim. The only studies on a possible ATR-distinction in Tungusic languages were conducted by Svantesson (1985) on data from Solon and recently by Lulich & Whaley