Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T15:15:17.760Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The trills of Toda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Siniša Spajić
Affiliation:
Phonetics Laboratory, Linguistics Department, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA.
Peter Ladefoged
Affiliation:
Phonetics Laboratory, Linguistics Department, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA.
P. Bhaskararao
Affiliation:
Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 4 Nishigahara, Kita-ku, Tokyo 114, Japan.

Extract

A hundred years from now a large number of presently spoken languages will no longer be viable means of communication, and the distinctive sounds that they contain will have disappeared. Of the nearly seven thousand languages in the world listed by Grimes (1992), about ten per cent are spoken by around a thousand people or less. As the speakers of these languages grow old, and their children go to schools in which the main languages of the country predominate, phoneticians will no longer have access to the wide variety of sounds currently in use. Toda, a language spoken by about a thousand speakers in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India, has some unusual sounds that will probably not exist in our great grandchildren's times. Among them are the six trills which this paper will describe. Tongue tip trills occur in about one third of the world's languages (Maddieson 1984). None of the languages in Maddieson's sample has two contrasting apical trills without secondary articulations, although they have been reported in Malayalam (Ladefoged 1971). To the best of our knowledge only Toda has three contrasting trills; and almost certainly no other language has surface contrasts between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of three lingual trills. Toda is a rich source for trill-seeking phoneticians.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Burrow, T., Emeneau, M.B. (1984). A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Catford, J.C. (1977). Fundamental Problems in Phonetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Condax, I.D., Nathan, G.S. (1979). It _sounds like some kind of ‘r’. Why? Paper given at the 54th meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.Google Scholar
Dart, S. N. (1991). Articulatory and acoustic properties of apical and laminal articulations. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 79.Google Scholar
Emeneau, M.B. (1984). Toda Grammar and Texts. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
Fant, G. (1968). Analysis and synthesis of speech processes. In Malmberg, B. (ed.) Manual of Phonetics: 171277. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Grimes, B. (1992). Ethnologue. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1975). A Course in Phonetics. First Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1982). A Course in Phonetics. Second Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1993). A Course in Phonetics. Third Edition. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P., Cochran, A., and Disner, S. (1977). Laterals and trills. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 7: 4654.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P. (1993). Linguistic phonetic fieldwork: a practical guide. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 84: 125.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, P., Maddieson, I. (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lindau, M. (1985). The story of /r/. In Fromkin, V. (ed.) Phonetic Linguistics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McGowan, R.S (1992). Tongue-tip trills and vocal-tract wall compliance. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 91: 29032910.Google Scholar
Sakthivel, S. (1976). Phonology of Toda with Vocabulary. Annamalai University, Annamalainagar.Google Scholar
Shalev, M., Ladefoged, P., Bhaskararao, P. (1993). The phonetic structures of Toda. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 84: 89113.Google Scholar
Spajić, S., Ladefoged, P., Bhaskararao, P. (1994). The rhotics of Toda. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 87: 3566.Google Scholar
Stevens, K., Keyser, S. (1989). Primary features and their enhancement in consonants. Language 65: 81106.Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, P.S. (1983). Dravidian Comparative Phonology. Annamalai University, Annamalainagar.Google Scholar
Zvelebil, K. (1970). Comparative Dravidian Phonology. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar