 Good morning and welcome to my presentation. First of all, I would like to thank my mentor, Nathan, for inviting me to talk to you here today. And I hope that I'll be able to present you with something that you would find interesting to listen to. I would also, from the outset, like to invite your comments and suggestions. I have no handouts, but I have two papers, draft papers, which I'd like to share with you if you are after this talk interested to know more. I'm basically a field linguist. I've described a small and dangerous Tibetan-Burman language spoken in the Eastern Himalayan region. I've written a grammar of that language and during my field research I also collected data on seven presumably related linguistic varieties. And right now I'm using these data to reconstruct the purported proto-language, which I've called proto-western ko-boa. And today I would like to share with you a few ideas on the onsets looking from the perspective of two of these varieties. I'll start with a short introduction because probably the ko-boa languages are, you are not very familiar with them, if you've ever heard of them at all. I will give a short introduction to my data and the methodology that I followed, which all of you are very much familiar with, so I'll not discuss that in detail. I'll quickly show a few trivial and regular correspondences. Again, not very surprising, not very interesting, so I'll just go through them very quickly. And then I would like to focus on some of the more extraordinary, not really maybe in a typological perspective, but at least in this case what caught my attention, which are the pellet-lized onsets, the rothic-onset clusters, the uvular-onsets, voiceless-onsets. And finally I would like to show you a few noteworthy correspondences with other Tibetan-German languages. Ko-boa languages are a small cluster of supposedly related languages spoken in Western Arunachal Pradesh, which is the area which is bordered by Bhutan in the West, Myanmar in the East, then the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas in the North, and the Brahmaputran plains of Assam in the South. Based on research materials that became available, basically only in the last two decades of the previous century, it was Jenshin Jackson-san who first came up with the hypothesis that these languages, instead of being just some kind of a residue of languages, Tibetan-German languages actually might be related to each other. Since then his view has been both adopted as well as challenged. However, till now there has not really been a lot of or any linguistic evidence which either supports or discredits his view. Among these Ko-boa languages a certain subgroup can be discerned, the Western Ko-boa languages, which are mentioned here. Basically four languages with a total of eight individual varieties spoken by less than 7000 people in the Western part of Arunachal. With as close as genetic relatives Puroik and Bugun, all these languages must be considered endangered, not just because of the low-speaker population but also because of the rapid socio-economic developments in this area, which are really very rapid. This map shows all the hitherto identified Ko-boa languages, the Puroik area which is in the central and western part of the state, huge geographical area there speaking this language interspersed with Nishi, Bangru and Miji speakers. Then here we find the closely related mutually intelligible Bugun varieties. And here in the western part of the area we find the Western Ko-boa languages, Kisvi and Duhumbi spoken here. Then the Sachtang varieties spoken in this small area here and the Shedupen varieties spoken in the Tengah river valley. As you can see this is a relatively fragmented area. There are speakers of other more dominant both linguistically as well as socio-culturally more dominant speakers. In the neighborhood the Tangla speakers, for example, who separate the Kisvi and Duhumbi from the other Western Ko-boa speakers. So there has been a lot of language contact, both through contact languages as well as through inward migration and intermarriage, not just from Tangla also from central Bodhis-Bhagpa, from the Tibetan side, Tiu Changa speakers from Bhutan, Kengah speakers from Bhutan and in the eastern part the Miji and the Russo-Aka. So a lot of contact language influence which is important to be aware of. My former colleague Ismail Lieber here and myself, we did a lexico-statistical study, a Kognut count analysis with sensitivity analysis and here you can see the results. We used 100 so-called stable roots and around 20% of these stable roots are shared among all the Ko-boa varieties. A percentage which goes up to around 40% between two individual Ko-boa varieties. So that's not a lot, but in an area like this with so much of language contact, considering stable roots which are not very prone to borrowing, that might be indicative. We can also see that the Western Ko-boa languages are the square in the left upper corner, Boogun languages in the middle and the Puroik varieties which show most internal variation in the right lower corner. So there appears to be a rather clear subgrouping. My research is based on original field data of all the eight known Western Ko-boa varieties. I started out with a word list of more than 550 lexemes which were from the most commonly used word lists, but also regionally, socioculturally, environmentally specific words which I collected based on my own experience in the area. A minimum of two speakers from each variety and I also collected additional lexemes based on sentences etc. to find more about the morphology of these varieties. Finally I went back to elicit some missing lexemes like the gaps in the cognate sets and also some interesting forms on basis of particular onsets or particular rhymes which I thought might be interesting to have some more information about. Methodology you will be very familiar with. One important thing to mention is perhaps that I started out with a comparison between Dohumbi and Koitam and the reason for that is that Dohumbi is rather conservative as far as rhymes are concerned. It has innovated a bit more in the onsets and it's also been on a more contact language influence but still the rhyme patterns are very interesting and Koitam is rather representative of the Sautang and Chef de Pen varieties. Here are some trivial correspondences, nothing out of the ordinary here in which all the Western Cogba varieties have the same reflex from a reconstructed protoform. Regular correspondences where they don't all have the same reflex but still these reflexes are not very surprising, not very special and easily derivable from an onset. So rather than that I would like to focus a bit more on some special onsets. First of all there are a number of cognate sets where Dohumbi and Kispi have a voiceless palatal fricative onset which corresponds regularly with aspirated palatal and alveolar africates in the Sautang and Chef de Pen varieties. So my proposal here is that this derives from palatalized plosive onsets both in the voiceless counterpart there in which it is the Sautang and Chef de Pen varieties which actually show a distinction between an aspirated reflex and a voiceless reflex. There's another correspondence set where a Dohumbi simple bilabial plosive onset corresponds to voiced palatal africate onset in Coitam. However this is only when followed by an open high vowel and this is actually a homophonous set of, a homophonous correspondence for cognate sets in which we find this correspondence which I've attributed to the open high vowel and as you can see in the second set of examples the influence of an open high vowel or open high vowel rhyme on an onset can be rather distinctive. So whereas normally we have a correspondence of a bilabial plosive in all varieties there are a few cognate sets where we see a bilabial plosive in Dohumbi and Kispi correspond to the voiced alveolar africate, a sibilant onset. So here we can see this distinct influence of high vowels and high vowel rhymes. You may notice that there is a kind of a noticeable correspondence between western coboa, bilabial plosive onsets and nasal onsets in the Tibetan-Burman languages. This is something that I will come to a little bit later. Then the second is the robotic onset clusters. There are certain correspondences that are irregular in the sense the correspondence itself is regular, the cognate sets are regular but there is a different kind of reflex in some of the varieties. For example here you can see that in the first group that the Khoitam reflex is an africate whereas we would have expected a simple velar onset. So in this case I have reconstructed robotic onset clusters both with velar stops, with bilabial stops and with a voiced alveolar fricative onset. So interesting is perhaps the phonological change that affected these onsets. These are regularly simplified in Dohumbi, Kispi, and the Sherdu-Pen varieties to a velar onset but they became palatal africates in Khoitam, Rahung and Jirigau There are very peculiar retroflex africates, at least in an aerial perspective for the western Khova languages, it's more common in Rushi's languages of the retroflex africates. I have only one example from the voiced onset and there are several examples from aspirated velar onsets. The reflexes are a little bit different in the case of a voiceless, an aspirated velar onset. There is a glottal fricative onset in Jirigau with a subsequent contraction of the root and the prefix. So in the first case of the wild boar Sahen becomes Sen. In the second case Barkingdeer Sahi becomes Si. But we see that the glottal fricative onset has been preserved in the case of bone which might be attributed to the vocal prefix instead of the prefix. The Shah prefix, the meter animal prefix. So this is the only case in which there are a little bit unexpected reflexes. We would have expected, for example, an unaspirated, unvoiced reflexes also in Dohumbi but as you can see in the case of Barkingdeer that correspondence holds but in the case of wild boar and bone there is aspiration which may be attributed to a prefix. Plusters of a bilabial plosive and rotic medial are simplified to bilabial plosive onsets in Kisbe and Dohumbi but have been preserved in the Sartang and Sheredupan varieties although the rotic became a lateral medial in most Sartang and Sheredupan varieties except for Rahum which has, in most cases, well in all cases preserved the rotic medial. The reason for not reconstructing a bilabial plosive and lateral onset cluster here is because there is no other evidence for lateral onset clusters. So velar and lateral onset clusters, I have no evidence that suggests this but as you saw in the previous slides there is evidence for a velar and rotic medial onset. And I've earlier shown that bilabial onsets followed by a high vowel or high vowel rhyme have divergent onset reflexes. The same is the case with these rotic onset clusters. So the reflexes here are different from what we would expect. So again it is this high vowel or high vowel rhyme which seems to have some kind of a mediating influence on the onset. These correspondences are the main source of the Dohumbi onset cluster pshe which indeed itself occurs only when followed by a high vowel or a high vowel rhyme. In the case of swell, fill, full and four, the onset reflexes actually in my opinion may not really show for a onset cluster but perhaps rather a prefix or a pre-initial rather than the onset cluster but I'm sure there are people here who have their own interesting ideas on that so maybe we'll keep that for discussion later. Now I would like to pay some attention to a rather modally mixed bag of correspondences that I was kind of left with after setting up all the other correspondence patterns. We see that the semantics of these sets are very clear. There is not much case of where you have to look for semantic cognate forms which are very different and even the rhyme reflexes are rather predictable. They are regular. The onsets are the only ones that are a little bit strange and based on the comparative evidence, well first after internal reconstruction like after excluding other possible reasons, for example other possible simple onsets, palatalized onsets, rotic onset clusters or possible explanatory phonotactic conditions it is the comparative evidence where I found some information that this might actually derive from uvular onsets. In the western Kogwa varieties themselves, uvular onsets are not attested except in Duhumbi where it occurs as an allophone of an aspirated velar onset. For the rest, they are not a distinctive phoneme in any of the western Kogwa varieties. Like I said, both the internal evidence and the form of onset correspondences that do not fit in with any of the other correspondences and comparative evidence from in this case quite often all Chinese or basically always all Chinese suggest that in these cases rotic onset clusters of a uvular plosive can be reconstructed. In this case it is the unexpected rhyme reflexes in the case of soy bean and egg which actually necessitate a labialized onset and in combination with the divergent onset reflexes I propose that these derive from a labialized uvular stop which in the case of koi tam suk has actually been contracted so there is again the prefix shayu shahua which becomes se yuk in koi tam and is then contracted to suk for example in jirigaon we still find the original form se yuk and in the case of hand arm it is probably the complete absence of a prefix that resulted of the loss of the onset in the satan and shahada pen varieties where they have now retained only a uvular vocal onset instead of the expected palatal glide so it would have been yik if there had been a prefix but because there was no prefix the palatal glide was lost and it became yik there are a few cognate sets where a duhumbi and kispi labial approximate onset corresponds to palatal approximate initials in satan and shahada pen I propose that this derives from voiced uvular onsets which again is kind of supported by the comparative evidence from Chinese, old Chinese there is another correspondence where vocal onsets in the western cobra varieties correspond to voiced uvular onsets in old Chinese which I will show you in a few slides there are several cognate sets between western cobra varieties that cannot be explained and here I would like to reconstruct voiceless onsets in which the characteristic reflex is actually a glottal fricative and at least one of the varieties why in the case of voiceless nasal onsets the glottal fricative is in duhumbi whereas the nasal is in the satan and shahada pen varieties but it's exactly the opposite when we look at the approximate onsets in this case the palatal and the labial approximate onset that is something that's still a bit of a mystery to me here are some of the examples I think considering the time I will not go much into these in the following slides I would like to present some additional evidence of relatively unique correspondence between western cobra and other Tibetan languages some of these correspondences were already identified before and I would like to present some additional evidence for these characteristic for the cobra languages is the correspondence between plosive onsets with nasal onsets in other Tibetan varieties I saw already in your handouts that that also is a correspondence between basque and proto or considered to be a correspondence between basque and proto Indo-European so it might not be that typologically that strange but for the Tibetan languages except for a few bisu varieties this is probably quite exceptional some examples of these correspondences are provided here with the western cobra reconstructions all having a plosive onset but the comparative evidence from other Tibetan languages showing a nasal onset this correspondence also found in the velour point of articulation as these examples show here a western cobra velour plosive onset corresponds to other Tibetan Burman velour nasal onsets and there's even one case at the dental point of articulation although the evidence is only for Duhumbi and Kispi because the Sartang and Sherdupan varieties have a nasal onset as the other Tibetan Burman languages I have noticed how somehow correspondences of proto-western cobra stop onsets often tend to correspond to all Chinese nasal onsets in type A syllables some of these examples I already showed before on the other hand proto-western cobra nasal onsets often correspond to all Chinese nasal onsets in type B syllables so this is perhaps a kind of a noteworthy correspondence however as always where you find regular correspondence patterns you have your exceptions where either proto-western cobra nasal onsets correspond to all Chinese nasal onsets in syllables of type A where we can see that these syllables pelletalize the onsets pelletalize in western cobra or we have proto-western cobra stop onsets that correspond to all Chinese nasal onsets in syllables of type B now because I'm still a little bit unfamiliar with the distinction between Chinese all Chinese type A and type B syllables and the various theories that surround this I cannot yet draw any conclusions regarding this but these are just my observations and I'm happy to hear people's ideas and suggestions another observation is that western cobra vocal onsets often correspond to a sibilant onset in other Tibetan-Burman languages some of the cognate sets that show these correspondence are presented here a major outstanding issue is shown in the last two examples where a voiceless alveolar fricative onset in other Tibetan-Burman languages just regularly corresponds with a sibilant onset or in some cases a glottal fricative onset in the western cobra varieties so what are the conditions that result in the vocalization or in preservation of the original onset this is again something that I will have to look into more closely there is another set of correspondences where western cobra vocal onsets correspond to reconstruct all Chinese voiced uvular stop in these cases although it's tempting to reconstruct a voiced uvular stop for proto-western cobra I think it is prudent to just reconstruct the most straightforward onset which in these cases would be the vocal onset maybe later evidence will actually show that this derives from all uvular stop onsets then there is a regular correspondence in the western cobra languages between voiceless dental nasal onsets initials two examples of this are given here in some cognate sets we can observe how the voiceless dental onset in western cobra corresponds to a voiceless lateral or voiceless or voiced lateral onset in type A syllables in all Chinese so again just an observation of quite a regular pattern at least in those cognate sets where I could find comparative evidence from all Chinese although you may not really agree with all my semantic correspondences here a rather curious correspondence that is nonetheless very regular is the correspondence between a Duhumbi and Kispi dental plosive onset and erotic onset in all other varieties and I propose that this derives from an onset cluster of voiced uvular fricative and erotic medial as you already saw erotic medial onset clusters are not uncommon at least in the reconstruction it's also noted how this western cobra correspondent quite often tends to correspond with dental plosive onsets in all Chinese so again an observation of a possible comparison with all Chinese and other Tibetan languages okay, wow you didn't have to use the... okay thank you very much for your attention if there are any questions, suggestions, ideas then I would be happy to discuss them since there is more than enough time anyway