New Publication: Revisiting Tones in Melamchi Yolmo [Open Access]
Last week was the International Congress of of Phonetic Sciences 2019, in Melbourne. ICPhS is only held every 4 years, and 800 phoneticians came together to share their work.
I had a poster with Amos Teo and Rael Stanley. We revisited old recordings from the 1980s that I archived with Paradisec a few years ago. Anna Marie Hari made those tapes while she worked with Melamchi Yolmo speakers - this is the main area Yolmo is spoken, and I’ve never had the chance to work there. Hari had an analysis that Yolmo has 4 tones, but so far we have only found evidence of 2 tones, which matches what we have found for other varieties of Yolmo. It’s been great to revisit old recordings with new analysis tools, and a great example of the importance of archiving the original recordings as well as publishing an analysis. We know Hari had a good ear so the next step is to figure out what she was listening to.
This paper is exciting for a number of reasons:
We got to use archive recordings to answer a new research question!
This is my first publication where we pre-registered our hypotheses and methods before we started the analysis. We used the OSF framework.
I finally got to use the new La Trobe poster template! You can see our poster here.
Because the conference was in Melbourne I got to sneak in for the poster session and say hi to everyone! We took a team photo (below) - that’s Rael, Amos and me with a very well behaved bub who slept through most of the session.
Abstract
Melamchi Valley Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal) was originally reported to have a four-way tonal con- trast. However, other varieties of Yolmo that have been more recently studied only display two-way tonal contrasts. In this paper, we examine newly digitised archival recordings of elicited utterances in Melamchi Valley Yolmo made in the 1970s and 1980s to investigate the acoustic evidence for a four tone contrast. We find there is no evidence to sup- port the original analysis, and that the tone system of Melamchi Valley Yolmo looks similar to other Yolmo varieties.
Citation
Lauren Gawne, Rael Stanley & Amos Teo. 2019. Revisiting Tones in Melamchi Yolmo. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 3280-3284). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. [Open Access PDF]
More
Open access archival recordings (AH1 collection, PARADISEC)
OSF repository (pre-registration)
ICPhS Poster (Google Slides)
More on Yolmo on Superlinguo
