The Tonology of Khoekhoe (Nama/Damara) (review)

This is a slightly revised version of the author’s 1992 PhD thesis from University College, London. Ch. 1, the introduction, describes the use of the name ‘Khoekhoegowab’ or ‘Khoekhoe’ (the official name of the language spoken by Nama and Damara people in Namibia), the orthography of Khoekhoe, and some biographical information about Pastor Eliphas Eiseb, the (Damara) Khoekhoe speaker who provided the data for the tonological study.

Ch. 2 begins with an outline of some previous approaches to Nama tonology, including Beach’s now classic The phonetics of the Hottentot language, published in 1938. Spectrograms of the six basic ‘tonal types’ in Khoekhoe are given on pages 17–44. The tonal melodies are: double-low (level), low-rising, low (level), high (level), high-rising, double-high. There are thus in citation four level tones and two contour (rising) tonal melodies.

Haacke, following Beach, takes the bimoraic root as the basic tone-bearing unit. However, he also provides an analysis of Khoekhoe tonology in terms of four register tones. In this he differs from Roy Hagman’s Nama Hottentot grammar (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), who recognizes only three register tones. H argues here that in addition to the six main tonal melodies described above, there is evidence for an additional five melodies.

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to the patterns of tonal change in tone sandhi. In sandhi the six main tonal melodies are collapsed into four, the double-high becoming high and the high-rising becoming low. Khoekhoe tone sandhi can be seen as involving a system of tone displacement, adding to evidence for an underlying analysis of Khoekhoe tone as a register, rather than a contour, system.

Following the spectrograms and discussion of the tonal melodies are a discussion of tonogenesis in Khoekhoe (pp. 54ff) and a catalogue of possible depressor and nondepressor effects. While the table is interesting, the discussion is weak, and there is no information about the basis by which the depressor or nondepressor effect was calculated. For example, initial m is assigned the status of a possible depressor consonant, assumedly because six of the thirteen roots which have m as an initial consonant have either double-low or low-rising tones. However, seven of these thirteen roots have either high-rising or double-high tones. In order to determine a depressor effect for a consonant (for example, m), it should be the case both that m is associated with depressed tone on the following syllable (rather than a higher tone) and that another consonant with a relevant featural difference to m does not show these same effects. For example, to show that b is a depressor consonant in tonogenesis, one must show both that b is associated with lower tone rather than higher tone and also that p is not associated with the same effects.

The number of notational schemes for tone in the book is confusing. Firstly there is the ‘low-rising’, ‘high-level’, etc., which, as mentioned above, do not seem to be accurate descriptions of the tonal system. They are retained from Haacke 1976, Haacke’s unpublished Essex MA dissertation. A numbering system /12/ for double-low (level), for example, is used in the discussion in the text and in the rules for tone sandhi; however there are two sets of numbers, one based on H’s earlier (1976) description and the other the result of the current analysis. As seen from /12/, what is called ‘level’ in prose is not level in the numbering system. Finally, diacritics are used in the examples.

The book also suffers from the lack of a list of abbreviations. There is no summary, and even after several hundred pages of information about citation and sandhi forms, there is no clear explication of the wider issues involved in Khoekhoe tonology—how the system differs precisely from other tone languages or what aspects...