 OK, welcome everybody to our department seminar series. It's great to see many people around. It's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon, who is Lotte Arneo, who is visiting us from the University of Helsinki. She is here for a week. She came yesterday only, and has already done a lot of things, actually. So the time goes by quite quickly. She'll be here till Friday. There's frequent strikes of airline companies in Finland, I understand. So she may be here for longer if she has been resolved, apparently. So she will be here till Friday. So if you have questions afterwards, yes, the email is there. Or let me know if we can arrange something. Lotte has been working for a PhD study on the Tanzanian language called HA, which is similar, I guess, to Kenya Rwanda-Kirundi Haya. So it's spoken Western Tanzania, and then published a grammatical description of HA with Rudiga Kruppe in Cologne. And then she continued working in Tanzania, but has now moved her field site a bit further northwards and reports on a more recent fieldwork, which started, I think, on IKOMA, and has now expanded to involve other languages in the area. And through that, it looks specifically at language contact as well. And the languages she talks about today, like IKOMA, Nata, and Isenye. And yes, I should say that she is at the University of Helsinki. She's in the Institute for World Cultures, I think they are called Department of World Cultures. But there is a longstanding interest at the University of Helsinki in African languages and linguistics. So it's not a big unit, but it's a longstanding unit. They have Swahili programs as well. So in that sense, it's quite similar to what we are doing. So we're very pleased to have Lotta here. With that, maybe I think I should hand over. And yes, please come forward. And then, yes, if you have about, I think, 45 minutes to an hour, if you want to have a discussion, that's fine, so. OK, so the languages that I'm talking about today, IKOMA, Nata, and Isenye, I'm calling them varieties because it's not really clear whether we should call them languages or dialects of the same language. So these are Bantu languages spoken in Western Tanzania and with a Bantu language coding, it's EJ45. They are spoken in Mara region. And total number of speakers for the three varieties is about 30,000. And IKOMA is the biggest one of these varieties. And as Lot stated, I started with IKOMA, but now I've started also to compare IKOMA to the other languages of the region. And the area of languages that I'm currently most interested in is tone. And also today, we are going to talk about tone and how there are different tone or systems in this languages and also what can happen when languages get in touch with each other and what can happen to tones in those contact situations. IKOMA, Nata, Isenye are part of South Mara languages or also sometimes called Eastern Mara languages. Mara is the region. And Mara languages are part of Great Lakes, Bantu languages. And Great Lakes also includes Ha and Kirundi, Kinyarwanda that were mentioned just before by Lutz. In this map, Mara region is marked with the red color. And the yellow color is Tanzania. And the other regions of Tanzania, the borders of the region. So Mara is one of the smallest regions by area in Tanzania. And this is a more specific map of the region where you can see that Lake Victoria on the west and then Serengeti National Park on the east and Mara region is between those two. And IKOMA, Nata and Isenye are the languages spoken closest to Serengeti, so especially IKOMA. For IKOMA, the next-door neighbors are the Serengeti National Park animals. There are more than 20 Bantu languages in this Mara region. So although it's not a big region, there's a great variety on languages. Other languages, the languages that are most closely related to IKOMA, Nata and Isenye are Ngorea, Mekizu, Zanaki, Kurian, Kabua. The Zanaki is famous because Tanzania's first president, Muali Munyere, was a Zanaki. So the area is famous for that. In addition to the Bantu languages in the area, there are Nailotic languages that are not genetically related to Bantu languages at all. And all three major branches of Nailotic languages are represented in the Mara region. Southern Nailotic Daktoga and Eastern Nailotic Ma, the language of the Maasai, have been in the area for ages probably more than a thousand years, whereas Western Nailotic Lua is a more region, a recent comer, and the Lua has spread to Mara region from Kenya. The establishment of Serengeti National Park has actually changed the system and basically everything in the region a lot. The people used to live much more to the east and on the areas where Serengeti National Park is nowadays, but they were forced to move more to the west and also the creation of the National Park. By the creation of the National Park, they lost great part of their traditional grazing and hunting areas and had to change livelihoods. And the National Park is sometimes called Shambhala Bibi in Swahili. Do you know what Shambhala Bibi means? Anyone speak Swahili? Yeah, and who's the grandmother in this case? Or lady? Or the field of the grandmother or lady? It's the queen, so it's the queen's field, referring of course to the colonial times. But the people in the area are not particularly fond of the National Park because the benefits of the park have gone somewhere else than to the Mara region, so they have just lost their land but not really got anything in exchange for that. There are also later on some additions to the National Park, Icorongo and Grumeti, game conservation areas that further expanded the area of the National Park and again the area where the people could live is smaller after the establishment of these game conservation areas. The speakers of these three varieties, they use these names as ethnonyms and they identify themselves as speakers of these languages and with these names. They can easily understand each other when they talk maybe with some adaptation and these varieties have been classified as dialects of the same language first as the same Bantu language code which was EJ45 as I said before but almost exclusively based on lexicostatistics because they do share a lot of vocabulary but phonological and morphological evidence show more variation and it also seems that there's a lot of variation in the tonal systems of these varieties. Also historical evidence doesn't lump these three varieties as a single branch of the southern Mara Bantu languages. So lexical similarities are probably a result of long-term contact rather than shared genetic origin. Also recent findings seem to point to the fact that Icoma and Nata are much more closer to each other and then Isenya is more different from the other two. And now we get to the tonal systems. All of these three varieties have two level tones which can be analyzed as high tone and then nothing since the low tones are the default tones. Only high tones are active in any tonal rules and after the tonal rules all the syllables that are not connected with the high tone then they will be pronounced as low. So only highs need to be marked in the tonal descriptions. The tone bearing unit TBU is a syllable although all these languages have a contrastive long vowels. There are no contrastive tones on long vowels so every syllable can have a maximum of one tone and all falling and rising tones are predictable. So they are not contrastive. There are many similarities in surface realizations of the tone in these three varieties but when we look closer at the languages we will see that the underlying tonal system and today we are going to look at the nominal tone system so we'll see that there are big differences in the underlying organization of the tones in these varieties. I have done fieldwork mainly on ecoma but also collected some Nata and Isenye data and so all ecoma and Isenye data in this presentation comes from my own field notes but some Nata data is taken from Angelescus 2013 presentation which you will find information on that on the references and also the analysis of Nata nominal tone is based on Angelescus analysis. My data that I have collected for Nata verifies his analysis but I don't have that extensive data myself. Also please note that there might be inconsistencies in writing the vowels because all of these varieties they have highly complex vowel harmonies. Ecoma vowel harmony has been described by Higgins in 2012 but the other two varieties the vowel harmonies are definitely different from ecoma but it's not known how they are different and how the system works but ecoma vowel harmony system is really complex so there might be mistakes in those. There are many words in ecoma and Nata Isenye that have the same surface tonal forms as can be seen in this slide here. The noun class prefixes are separated with a hyphen so the first part of the word noun is always the noun class prefix and after that there's a noun stem and the high tones are marked with a hyphen accent mark on top of the vowel and the low tones as I said are the default tones so they are not marked in this presentation at all. As you see there are many words that share the same tonal patterns there are some differences in other like the vowels and some consonants are different but they are very similar many of them anyway. But when we look at a wider set of data we can see that there are also many words that have really different surface tone patterns and in this set of data these three varieties they all have a different tone on the same nouns the nouns are related but the tones are different. Then on the following slides there are word triplets that have where two of the varieties have the same tonal form but then one is different in the first one Nata and Isenye have the same form but Ikoma has a different form so in these words usually Ikoma doesn't have a tone a high tone at all whereas Nata and Isenye have a high tone on the first syllable of the stem and in these words Ikoma and Nata have the same tonal form whereas Isenye has something different again for example in the word Mosquito the Ikoma and Nata have the high tone on the last syllable but Ikoma has Isenye has the tone on the first syllable of the noun stem and then a third set of data where Ikoma and Isenye have the same form but Nata is different so they are all combinations of tones but it seems that the tonal systems are different in these varieties and also that the system are so different that they cannot be derived from one another and there's no one-to-one match between certain tone types between these languages or language varieties When we look at this set of data there are some generalizations that are found First of all, Ikoma and Isenye never show tone on the noun class prefixes whereas in Nata that occurs pretty frequently Secondly, Nata doesn't have multiple syllables with a high tone whereas Ikoma and Isenye do and Nata and Isenye do not have toneless words and again Ikoma does have toneless words so there's a difference one more difference and Nata is the only variety in which singular and plural forms sometimes have different tonal realizations for example in the last table with the nouns there's Nata word for egg there's difference between egg and eggs in the tonal realisation but let's first have a look at all these varieties in turn and then get back to comparing them and let's start with Isenye because that has the most simple system of the three If we look at the data that I presented in the tables on the previous slides it is pretty obvious that in Isenye there are two tonal types there are noun stems that have high tone on the first syllable of the stem which I call just high stems in here and then there are noun stems that have a high tone on all of the syllables that I call all high so only these two types occur in Isenye data with monosyllabic noun stems as the four last ones in this slide these two types coincide so it's not possible to tell to which group they really belong is there a high on the first of the stem or a high on all of the stem syllables because that's the same thing with bisyllabic nouns in Isenye by far the most common type is the type where there's a high tone on the first syllable of the stem so the first the leftmost type whereas the all high pattern is only in about 10% of the nouns but with longer nouns with bisyllabic nouns the two patterns are kind of equal equally represented longer nouns than bisyllabic nouns are excluded from this presentation since they are not that many longer nouns and also the four syllabic and longer nouns that are found are usually compounds or reduplicated stems and they can behave tonally in a different way anyway so I'm not discussing them at all in this presentation with this rather reduced tonal system that they are only two way distinction of tones it's possible that Isenye is changing from a tonal system towards a system of regular stress and that is not at all surprising since the national language in Tanzania Swahili has a very regular penultimate stress and especially the tone patterns of the bisyllabic nouns coincide with the penultimate stress because all the tones are on the penultimate syllable anyway but with monosyllabic and longer nouns this is not the case so there is some simplification in the system but I think Swahili is not the only one to blame here because there are other things going on it's not that everything is just going towards Swahili but more research is needed on that as well Next let's look at Ikoma which has a nominal tone system which is very similar to Isenye but more complex Ikoma has retained the proto-ban to the hypothetical proto-language tonal distinction of monosyllabic nouns where there are high toned monosyllabic nouns and toneless or low toned monosyllabic nouns so there are two tonal groups with monosyllabic stems Bisyllabic stems have a three-way distinction which is very common across Bantu languages especially Eastern Bantu languages there's a high tone on one of the stem syllables either first or the last or there are no tones at all or you could say that the third set is low low type of tone In Ikoma the first pattern is again by far the most common which is about 68% of the nouns that I have in my about 250 bisyllabic noun stems whereas the second type is only about 12% and the rest about 20% is then the toneless noun stems With trisyllabic and also longer stems but I'm not discussing the longer stems now Ikoma tone patterns become more complicated and they also, it's different from the normal pattern of Eastern Bantu languages In Ikoma there are five tonal patterns for trisyllabic noun stems there's a pattern without a tone which is the first one then there are three patterns where the high tone can be on one of the stem syllables and then there's the fifth pattern where there's an all high pattern which was also found in Isenye and in Bantu languages of the area what we would expect is the first four patterns but not the fifth so that is kind of an odd thing to see in Bantu languages in the area Ikoma forsyllabic noun stems also have the same pattern the all high pattern they have like toneless noun stems the high tone on one of the stem syllables and then the all high pattern so the number of tonal patterns that Ikoma nouns have is n plus two where n is the number of syllables the stem syllables whereas the normal thing in the area for Bantu languages is n plus one which would cover the first four patterns here I will discuss this high high high or all high pattern later on in this presentation but let's now have a look at Nata nominal tone system first as I said earlier with the analysis of the Nata data I rely on Angelescu's presentation which he gave in the Bantu conference in Paris in June and according to him Nata has three types of nominal tones which are exemplified here and with these I would like you to do some work as well so if we start looking at type three which is the right most type what is common with the how would you describe the nouns where the tone is in the type three nouns final syllable, yes it's always on the final syllable and then type two the middle one the third syllable, yes and this is why we get different the placement of the tone is different with some singular plural forms like the egg eggs again because the singular has only one syllable prefix whereas the plural prefix is biosyllabic so that's why the tone is moved towards the beginning of the stem what about the first type well that's the tricky one well it's not that tricky after all but I didn't discover this myself that's Angelescu's work so it's on the second syllable Angelescu's first syllable is a heavy syllable and then it's moved back to the first syllable so a syllable with a nasal following the vowel that's also considered a heavy syllable in Natta so these types assign a high tone on a certain syllable of the noun including the noun class prefix as in Ikoma and Isenya it's the stem where the tone is assigned to so it's the different domain altogether how the tone is assigned with some nouns again as in Isenya as well it's not possible to tell to which type they belong to for example the word on the bottom the mosquito could be type two or type three without changing the prefix or doing some other kinds of changes we can't really tell to which type it belongs to with some of the nouns for example the monosyllabic nouns that I've listed under type three there's actually a kind of different realisation of the tone between type two and type three even if the tone should fall on the final syllable on both of them with type three there's always some anticipation of the tone on the penultimate syllable already whereas that doesn't happen with type two nouns even if the tone was on the last syllable for example in the word robes it's strictly on the final syllable whereas for example the word guinea fowl and the third type the tone starts to rise already on the second syllable of the word so here's Angelescu's description of the three types which we just found out in the data but now let's compare the three system and Hyman has presented two criteria for stress languages and these are obligatoriness which means that every lexical word has at least one syllable marked for the highest degree of prominence which is usually the primary stress and culminativity which means that every lexical word has at most one syllable marked for the highest degree of prominence and of these three varieties Nata meets both criteria since every word must have a high tone but there are no tone less words and also that there are no multiple linked high tones in Nata so Nata could be analysed as a stress system in which high tone represents the highest prominence in Isenium on the other hand only the criterion for obligatoriness is satisfied since there are no tone less nouns again but there are nouns that are high tones that are linked to multiple syllables and Ikoma doesn't fulfil either of these criteria because Ikoma has tone less nouns and also high tones that are spread on whole noun stems when trying to establish some possible historical links or relationships between these three varieties there are only some generalisations that we can make at this point of research for example there's the kind of summary of the tonal types so Nata has all three types with all kinds of nouns Ikoma has N plus two tonal types with all nouns where N is the number of the stem syllables and Isenium has only two tonal types not depending on the length of the nouns but all noun types have only two types of tonal representations so Ikoma has retained the tonal opposition of Proto Bantu with monosyllabic nouns Nata has assigned these nouns to types one which is the low in Proto Bantu and in Nata type one there's a high tone on the second syllable of the noun unless the first is the heavy one where it's shifted there and to type three which is the high in Proto Bantu and Isenium has no tonal contrast anymore with the monosyllabic stems and this is the diagram that shows the relationships between the monosyllabic nouns and the tonal types between the varieties with trisyllabic nouns it seems that the tonal stems of Ikoma are mostly in type one in Nata this would indicate that Nata has invented the tone type one in order to avoid tonal nouns but the rest of trisyllabic noun stems are not distributed on one-to-one basis and Ikoma and Nata and more data is needed before any generalizations can be said about trisyllabic and longer nouns when looking at bisyllabic noun stems Nata types correspond to Ikoma tone types in this manner type one nouns correspond to Ikoma high on the first syllable and toneless syllables type two is only high tone on the first syllable of the stem in Ikoma and type three of Nata again corresponds to two different patterns in Ikoma and the other way around where Ikoma has a high tone on the first syllable of the stem those nouns are found in all three classes or tonal types in Nata whereas the other two types correspond to just one tonal type in Nata and Isenye has only the two patterns as mentioned earlier and the bisyllabic stems those with the all high pattern in Isenye all seem to fall into the pattern where there's a high tone on the first syllable of the stem in Ikoma but also of those stems that have the high on the first syllable of the stem may have the same pattern in Ikoma so they are kind of mixed and Isenye bisyllabic stems where there's a high on the first syllable of the stem are again found in all three tonal types in Ikoma and this represents the relationships between the tonal types and it's so much more messy than with the monosyllabic nouns so trying to find out what the history how these systems have developed but there's still a lot of more work to do in that so although Ikoma nominal system seems to be the most tonal of these three varieties it's interesting to note that syllable weight plays a role in Ikoma verbal or grammatical tone that in the kind of the same way as it does in Nata nominal tone for example the subjunctive forms of Ikoma there's tone assigned on the second syllable of the macro stem the macro stem is the verbal stem together with the possible object prefix and on the left hand side there are verbs where you can see that it is on the second syllable the high tone is on the second syllable of the macro stem but if the stem has an initial long vowel the tone is again shifted to that long vowel and that is shown on the right hand side of the slide where both of the bring and to eat verbs they have a long vowel as the first of the stem Nata cannot have toneless nouns as we saw before but Ikoma can but in Ikoma if a toneless noun is preceded by a toneless verb an initial high tone is inserted on the first syllable of the noun although before I showed that Ikoma can't have tones on the nominal prefixes but on the wider context it can and both of these nouns whole and cloth they are toneless nouns but in this context where the verb that precedes them doesn't have a high tone at all so there's a high tone insertion and the high tone falls on the first syllable of the noun, not the stem in this time so again this is very similar to what we saw in a tonal type one in Nata but a very different context so the systems they are definitely related but they are not the same and it's not really clear how the whole thing has emerged and what has been the historical starting point for these languages but now let's go back to Ikoma and the all high or the not normal Bantu pattern that I presented earlier to be in Ikoma especially in the triselabic and longer nouns I think this tone pattern is a result of our long term contact with Datoga the Nailotic language in the area the Ikoma and the Datoga have coexisted in the area for probably more than a thousand years and they have really practised ecologies so that the Datoga were the herders of the plains whereas Ikoma were the farmers of the hills and it is told that before the arrival of the Germans in the beginning of last century the peoples of the area hadn't organised themselves under ethnic chiefs but they had an age set system which was shared across different ethnic groups thus when the Germans came to the area they wanted to use the local chiefs in their administration and they found that there were no chiefs when they were puzzled with this they decided to name the rain makers as chiefs so the Ikoma didn't have their own rain maker but they relied on the Datoga on these issues so it happened that the first Ikoma chief was actually a Datoga with this background in mind it's not at all surprising there are many linguistic features probably including tonal patterns possibly vowel harmony patterns were borrowed from the Datoga language to Ikoma it has been suggested early in literature that a contact situation usually leads to simplification of prosthetic systems especially when the tonal language comes into contact with the stress language as I described earlier with Isenje and Swahili however it seems that in this case in Ikoma the contact with Datoga has led to a situation in which the nominal tone system has become more complex a new tonal pattern the all high pattern was introduced into Ikoma tone system and without that new tonal pattern Ikoma would be on the same line with Isenje as in the typological system but with the new tonal type where the high is attached or linked to multiple syllables which is not at all allowed in other contexts in Ikoma and thus it kind of changed the typological system of the language so if we think of a continuum where there are non-tonal languages and then extremely tonal languages on the other end with the addition of the Datoga tonal pattern Ikoma has moved a step towards the extremely tonal end of the continuum so far I have compared my Ikoma lexical database which is compiled in cooperation with the SAEL team in the area so two Datoga sources I've been able to find so far so there's not much on Datoga and especially the Datoga of the Mara area there are some other Datoga groups also in other parts of Tanzania so most of the data that exists on Datoga is on those groups my Ikoma database consists of some 1500 words and Rotland which is also mentioned in the references he's common Datoga word list consists of some 500 words and these two lists haven't been compiled with the same goal in mind so there are a lot of words that are found only in one of the lists so also much more data is needed in this on Datoga and Ikoma as well in this slide there are Slavic Ikoma nouns with the all high pattern and possible Datoga counterparts on the right hand side there's first the common Datoga form which is a form shared with all different Datoga varieties and then in parenthesis there's the Mara variety form if that is found and the common Datoga forms in Rotland's word lists are not marked for tone but luckily the Mara variety forms are also there are some cognates of with earlier branches of southern Nailotic language is the Proto-Collegian and Nandi Marqueta and some words that are possibly found in Ikoma from these stages as well when we look at the contents of these words it's rather obvious and not at all surprising taken into consideration the livelihood of the Datoga being hearders that most of these words are related to keeping animals there are some words that might be considered basic vocabulary items such as animal which is not in this list but it is probably also a long word from Datoga but no for example body parts and basic verbs since the Datoga noun stems and with consonant a vowel is added to the end of the Ikoma versions of these and of course then the Bantu noun class prefix is added to the Ikoma versions of these words also the Datoga nouns are borrowed to Ikoma mostly without the Datoga final suffix which is seen in the Mara variety forms not in the common Datoga forms and the Datoga words always have to occur with at least one suffix so this could indicate that either the Ikoma speakers who adopted the Datoga words were highly competent in Datoga so that they could analyse the structure of the nouns or the loan words were taken in Ikoma first by Datoga who spoke Ikoma either way there have been speakers with good command of both languages so all of these nouns in Ikoma have the all high tone pattern and it's marked here again so when looking at bisyllabic nouns again most of the noun stems in Ikoma have the same tonal pattern which is the high on the first syllable of the stem and actually the pattern with bisyllabic nouns which is the most prominent in this list the high on the first syllable of the stem it can be argued that actually that kind of coincides with the all high pattern because in Proto Bantu the two tonal patterns that existed in Proto Bantu where there was high on both syllables of the stem and high tone on just the first syllable of the stem have collapsed into the high low or high and nothing no tone in Ikoma so actually the high on the first syllable could be called as well high on both of the syllables and also when we look at the phonetic realizations of the high low pattern it's often pronounced as high high for example utterance finally there wouldn't be a difference how these two forms are pronounced so we could actually say that the all high pattern of a longer noun is actually the same pattern or included in this pattern on high on the first syllable of the by syllabic nouns in Ikoma and there's just an interesting distribution of nouns as I mentioned earlier the high low pattern or the high on the first stem syllable that's about 68% of the nouns and if we look at the longer nouns the same we get the same percentage if we combine the two tonal types the one with the all high pattern and the pattern with the high on the first syllable of the stem so it's possible that these two types have been combined in the by syllabic stems I also compared Datoga loan words to other loan words in Ikoma to see if we get the the all high pattern and the only other loan words that are recognisable at the present set of data the loan words in Swahili from Swahili that are originally from other languages from non-Bantu languages such as Arabic Portuguese and English and Swahili influence in Ikoma is much more reason than the Datoga influence as it started only with the trade contacts and was further strengthened by the modern educational system founded by the colonial rulers as mentioned earlier Swahili has a regular stress pattern of penultimate stress that applies prominence on the stress syllable and this is the same with if we look at the first two words in the list the pineapple and butter is butter but it should be so again it coincides with the Swahili stress pattern but when we look at the longer nouns there is so much more variation the type where the high tone is on the penultimate syllable the last three examples that coincides with the Swahili stress pattern but they are also loan words from Swahili that have the high tone on the penultimate syllable or the final syllable or no tones at all and the only pattern that seems to be missing is the all high pattern seemingly it applies the all high pattern applies only to nouns with nylotic origin so how did this all high pattern emerge because if you look at the Datoga data in the earlier slides 31 and 30 and the lexical tones that are listed in those slides they don't express the all high pattern but the answer seems to lie in the tonal case system of Datoga in Datoga the citation form is the form that is used when the noun is in the object position of a transitive clause and also many other functions and it's called often the absolute case and not the accusative because it's so much more widely used than just accusative and this form also shows the lexical tones of nouns and those are the forms listed on slides 30 and 31 but the other case, the nominative case which is only used as a post verbal subject and it is only differentiated from the absolute case by tone and it has a set tonal pattern which overrides the lexical tones of nouns and that's all nouns in the nominative have the same tonal pattern in Datoga and I think this is the very likely candidate for the origin of the ecoma all high pattern since the nominative tone pattern is applied in Datoga in the following manner the first and the second syllable of the stem the stem is only marked with a hyphen in the second set on the right most examples so the first and the last syllable of the stem they get a high tone and then the high tone is spread to the suffix as well so we see that all the suffixes on the right hand side which shows that the nominative forms are high whereas the left hand side is the absolute forms with the lexical tones and all the syllables that are between the initial and the final stem syllable are low as in the last example on the right hand side but of course this takes at least tricellabic stem to show the low tone in between and it happens that all the stems that we have seen in Ikoma are maximally bisyllabic so they all have the high high tone on the stem in the nominative case so Kiesling's data from which this tonal analysis is taken from is actually gathered already on the 1930s by Paul Berger and it was not gathered in Mara region but in Central Tanzania but it will be interesting to see if the nominative tone pattern is still the same in present day language and especially in present day language of Datoga of the Mara region but luckily we have this set of historical data so that we can compare the systems in this manner finally just some remarks on possible other Datoga influence in Ikoma because I think it's very interesting for example Ikoma vowel harmony system is fairly unique in how complex it is and that has been described very well with Higgins 2012 so if you're interested in vowel harmonies that's a nice piece of work for you and it has been suggested by Nurse and Rotland in 1991 that the vowel harmony systems of these E40 languages have been induced by southern myelotic language but there's no research or really in depth study of that so further research is needed but it's worth noticing that when comparing the Mara Bantu language vowel harmonies Ikoma is the only one that has an ATR harmony system with mid vowel harmony whereas Zanaki and some other languages that have ATR harmony have the ATR harmony between the high vowels and then there are vowel harmony systems with vowel height but Ikoma is the only one with the system and that actually matches the Datoga vowel harmony Datoga has a mid vowel ATR harmony also there are some other features that are probably Datoga influence such as really strong final devoicing of vowels and sometimes even consonants in Ikoma and that's very typical for Datoga as well so to sum it up I think this is one example of how lexical statistics will not give the whole picture so we need much more information about languages how the systems of the languages work and not just compare some lexical items and on the whole more data is needed on these three varieties as well so that we can understand how these systems have emerged and what is the history of the languages of the area looking more closely at language varieties like in a more detailed way and not just lumping them together can also give us more insights on the history of the languages and also the typology of languages so it's worth really doing some comparison between dialects and not just think that they all work in the same way that's good which if I look at right is one whereby the nouns are put into a class which gives you a tone pattern where a more common type of modern used in this type of comparison would to put a noun in that just simply describe the tone pattern on the roots and then a rule which makes those tone patterns move in some way I wondered to what extent we reviewed those two models to see which one was most appropriate and I wondered whether even your your tonal pattern model which is applied to the entire macro not just the root does that model work even if you've got other prefixes I don't know anything about these languages but I am expecting to see variation in the augments and also possibly locative prefixes with other type of prefixes I'm not actually sure about locative prefixes I would have to look at that but with other type of prefixes where like diminutive or augmentative and for Nata it works you always count the second or the third syllable from the beginning of the word so that is one way of finding out to which group they actually belong to to change the form of the noun plus prefix and what comes to this type of present kind of system or how to present the tone I think it all depends on what kind of tone system you have in the language representing tones as tone typed instead of just stating that what kind of tones are in what stem I think it's a more efficient way of describing what's actually going on in the language but of course it doesn't work in all languages where you have to define tone for every syllable of the stem for example so then it wouldn't work but with this type of that we call reduced tone or system that so does that answer your question okay yes you have some justification for applying that type of model but I totally acknowledge that it doesn't work with all tonal languages not at all maybe if I made a question in the function of the cases in the in the context context, did you say it was a normal type of languages? yes the all high thing and that's a normal subject yeah but only post-verbal if it's in cleft constructions and where you change the word or like move the subject before the verb then it's the absolute and that's all as recognition? yes that's the normal yeah do you have a sense that the speakers are aware of the different tone patterns? any comment? no actually it took me quite a while to find this all high pattern it was so easily confused with the high on the first syllable or the high on the second syllable like a penultimate syllable of the stem so it and of course I wasn't looking for one because that's totally unexpected to find such a tone pattern in a Bantu language in that area so yeah but no they are not aware of that and the speakers of the comma that I worked with initially they were very unaware of the tones all together so yeah that's not a totally unexpected because it sounds like all high words would stand out no they don't and actually in a comma there's a funny tendency all together which I didn't mention earlier that they really like high tones so many syllables that are lexically toneless are pronounced as high especially in fast speech so for example if you have a high tone high toned and the toneless high tone toneless and this kind of alternative tones it's very likely that all the toneless syllables are pronounced as high as well so there's a really a preference for high tones although like lexically there are no other instances where a high tone is multiple linked than in these sounds for you that's a phonetic effect rather than a phonetic effect yes I think so because it's I mean if they pronounce something carefully and slowly then you don't see that but it's in kind of normal and fast speech that comes up actually I went as it works with other in context when for example if you put these all high words in associative phrases or something that works as a single high tone spread on all of them I didn't go into that now but I think it is a single high spread to all syllables Mary can I ask a sociological question what is people's feeling about the contact in general so there's no special standing out of the high tone but is there a sense that people feel or know that these are the tauga words no no it's like the tauga contact is like it's not nowadays anymore so it's like 50 years ago or something like that so the coming of Serengeti National Park has split them the tauga is there and with Swahili sorry Swahili is very common and of course everyone goes to school and learns Swahili and this kind of thing so yeah I don't think that younger ecoma speakers they don't know that tauga anymore so you just said that the ecoma speakers I'm really very aware of the tone are they aware that the tone is one okay so when they're thinking about the difference between ecoma and another and Serengeti are they sort of aware that sort of thing is yes yes they are aware that they kind of they say that they stretch things differently and yeah I think they use the word stretch so they stretch these certain syllables so in that sense yes they are aware of the tones but yeah any particular software to help you analyze tones or do you prefer to rely on your ear? well I use speech analyzer and mainly for the reason that there you can slow down the speech which is very useful especially for normal speech but yes the kind of the pitch curves that software can produce they are helpful definitely but you can't rely only on those because they sometimes miss something that you can hear with your own ears so it's a good help but it won't give you the whole story so which program did you say? speech analyzer which is an SL software freeware so it can download it yes a little bit but you can't slow down speech in that so that's why I use speech analyzer when you're starting on that type of work in a particular area presumably you've got to convince your respondents that these can and I'm presuming that an easy way to do it is with minimal parents yes but taking use of it did you find enough to make up a useful well in Bantu languages of this type you usually have very few minimal pairs like I had one with the stomach and the lous which is a very common Bantu pair but apart from that there are not many but what is actually useful is to to use cards with nouns spelled on the cards and first for example start with monosyllabic nouns and let the language consultant pronounce those nouns and together we decide whether they are like compare all the nouns to one card that you have and decide whether it has the same tonal pattern or not and then when you have a pile that the consultant thought are the same then you check those whether they are really the same and with monosyllabic nouns that's pretty easy you can first figure out which are the two tonal types but this with the trisyllabic nouns in ecom we did it so many times because initially we had about 20 piles it was so confusing also for the speaker and then finally we could reduce those for five piles but it took some time so you really use the patterns as a model yes yes yes for these languages which is it works in that way but it's also you have to compare words with similar syllabic structure so that it's really comparable first I think with that we are very happy and we sleep over a little bit more but thank you very much we're going to reconvene I guess to the institute if that's where we go we're going to literally get the institute so please feel free to join us and then probably have some food later on I think Lotta wants to eat some fish and chips she wants something cultural ethnic food thank you very much