Ket Prosodic Phonology (review)

The last remnant of the once more widespread Yenisseyan language family, which in turn remains un-relatable to any other language or family, Ket continues to be one of the great riddles of Eurasian linguistics. Spoken by ca. 500 individuals on the lower reaches of the river Yenissej in Northern Siberia, its overall typological makeup distinguishes it as possibly the most unusual of Siberian languages; apart from a really very unusual morphological features it shows an intricate system of phonological tones, the subject of this work.

In 22 pages, this book gives a concise overview of the problem of the Ket tonal system, acknowledging its discovery by Heinrich Werner in the 1960s and defending Werner’s views against other approaches which tried to describe Ket as a language without anything in the way of phonemic tone.

Working with taped recordings from all Ket dialects, the author offers a very detailed and adequate phonetic description of the articulatory basis of the four tones which are found with Ket monosyllabic words—1: high-rising, 2: rising-pharyngealized, 3: rising-falling, and 4: falling; he convincingly argues that, though the syllabic nuclei of these tones do differ in length, vocalic quantity is to be viewed as a secondary epiphenomenon of tone (Sections 1.1.–1.4.). Sections 4.1.–4.3. are devoted to the prosodic behavior of disyllabic structures, adding two more units to the system—5: a disyllabic contour with higher pitch on the first syllable, and 6: its mirror image. Both these entities are described as allotones of the (monosyllabic) tones 1 and 3 respectively. Ket, thus, has a word-tone system, much like many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, where the tone-bearing unit is the phonological word rather than the syllable (details of prosodic processes found in the domain of the phonological phrase are discussed in Section 5).

While not everything is entirely new in the sections discussed so far (but certainly presented in a much more convincing and lucid way here than anywhere else in the Ketological literature), Sections 2 and 3 present the field with a real step forward. Here, Vajda shows that any consequent and thorough acknowledgment of prosodic facts leads quite directly to a rather far-reaching reassessment of the segmental phoneme inventory of the language as well. Thus, both the distribution of voiced vs. voiceless plosives, as well as that of plain vs. palatalized consonants—traditionally mostly given the status of seperate phonemes—is convincingly shown to be allophonic when tones are brought into the picture.

Similarly, V convincingly shows that only 7 vowel phonemes (rather than 11, let alone as much as 56, as in some earlier descriptions) suffice to explain the surface variation of Ket vowels; again, this is only possible if prosodic/tonal observations are fully allowed to inform the analysis.

This is a very valuable, and clearly written, contribution to Ket/Yenisseyan studies; however, general phonologists, as well as students and specialists of other prosodically complex languages will equally profit from consulting it.