THE SOUNDS OF HMONG William Chang December 15 2005 Linguistics 110 Course Project Language Language Consultant The Hmong Hmong Hmoob are an aboriginal people group of China referred to within China as Miao Chinese mi oz Starting in the 18th century large numbers migrated to Thailand Laos Vietnam and Myanmar In the second half of the 20th century as a result of the Indochina and Vietnam wars some migrated to America French Guiana France and Australia The number of Hmong worldwide is very di cult to x Most Hmong live in China and I have seen gures for the population there to range from 7 million 1999 gure Ethnologue to 10 million 2000 Chinese census according to Wikipedia A gure I have seen for the number of Hmong worldwide however is 6 million 1999 gure Ethnologue The language that my language consultant speaks is Hmong Daw Hmong Hmoob Dawb or White Hmong which henceforth will simply be called Hmong The number of speakers of Hmong Daw is at least 165 000 worldwide Ethnologue It is mutually intelligible with Mong Leng or Green Hmong The color words arise from traditional Chinese designations for the tribes based on the color of women s dresses These are but a prominent two of many Hmong languages of which Ethnologue reports 21 These languages are in turn related to other Hmongic languages such as Bunu and they together in turn form the largest constituent in Hmong Mien which has 35 languages in all No broader classi cation has had scholarly consensus Traditionally Chinese linguists have held that Hmong is related to Chinese but if there is any genetic relation at all it is too distant to detect Inquiries into the possibility of genetic relation with Tai Austronesian or Mon Khmer languages have been inconclusive It is true however that Hmong and Chinese share many words through borrowing Moreover like many of its neighbors Hmong morphemes are preponderantly monosyllabic and always bear a tone and Hmong words are highly analytic My consultant was Ia Her Iab Hawj h a 21 year old woman and a student at Cal She grew up in a refugee camp for Hmong in the town of Chiangkham in the province Pha Yao in Thailand Her family had moved there from Laos Her mother speaks only Hmong and her father speaks Hmong and has limited pro ciency in Laotian Ia spoke only Hmong and was exposed minimally to Thai and other languages She was taught the Hmong RPA Romanized Popular Alphabet at a school for Hmong children which proved useful during our sessions for naming and eliciting sounds At age 8 her family moved to Sacramento California where they currently reside She speaks Hmong frequently with her family I wish to express heartfelt gratitude to Ia for the opportunity to study the sounds of a language I found both marvelous and elegant Ua koj tsaug 1 Overview of Hmong Phonology The basic phonological unit in Hmong is the syllable not the word Most morphemes are monosyllabic and most syllables have transparent meanings Words if polymorphemic are analytic and for this reason they are sometimes called terms with the morphemes themselves being called words I will try to steer clear of such ambiguities in this report Each Hmong syllable has an onset a rime and a tone out of a total possible of 57 onsets 13 rimes and 7 tones What complexity there is in the onset is made up for in the simplicity of syllable codas for the rimes are all zero coda except for two that end in In a language such as Hmong it is more convenient to speak of onsets and rimes than of segments Whereas it is quite right to say that an onset such as mpl which represents a pre nasalized bilabial stop with an overlapping lateral is 3 distinct segments the fact that such clusters are relatively few compared to the number of segments in the language persuades me to structure my analysis around onsets and rimes rather than around segments This report will discuss onsets rimes and tones in 3 respective sections The di cult matter of interactions between adjacent syllables will not receive systematic treatment but will be touched on throughout There are three appendices an explanation of the romanization scheme used in this report Hmong RPA a word list of some of the words that were elicited during this project and a list of words that exemplify each onset rime and tone encountered 2 ONSETS Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Alveolopalatal Post alveolar a ricate pl t ts t c k q aspiration p pl t ts t c k q Prenasalized stop mp mpl nt nts nt c k q mp mpl nt nts nt c k q aspiration Alveolar Retro ex Dental a ricate p Dental Bilabial with lateral Plain stop Interdental Bilabial Labiodental The 57 syllable onsets for Hmong are given in Table 1 below Please see Appendix C for exempli cations The best way to canvass such a large inventory of sounds is to discuss phonemes individually as necessary and by class when generalizations su ce Voiced stop d Voiced aspirated stop d Nasal voiced m ml n Nasal voiceless m m J n Fricative voiceless f Fricative voiced v s h j Approximant Lateral fricative Lateral approximant l Table 1 Hmong Syllable Onsets Asterisks mark onsets for which a word could not be found but which were recognized by the speaker as part of the language All references on Hmong include them Plain Stops For unvoiced and unaspirated stops not counting co articulations and a ricates there are 7 places of articulation bilabial interdental retro ex palatal velar uvular and glottal The 3 bilabial velar and glottal stops are much as they are in English and require no explanation Glottal stops occur only as onsets in syllables that would otherwise be without an onset Thus it was unclear whether glottal stop was a real phoneme or merely an epiphenomenon arising from the need for speakers to begin utterances with something or divide up syllables Ia always made glottal stops in words like ku eleven but I intentionally spoke the word to her without the glottal stop and she said it sounded ne Interdental stops are made with the tongue poking out slightly between the upper and lower teeth Retro ex stops are made with the underside of the tongue tip pressed against the gum ridge and the back of the top front teeth These two stops are not very distinct to a speaker of English subjectively a sound such as ta sounds brighter and cleaner and a sounds darker fuzzier and slightly rhotacized but I decided to measure the acoustic properties of these two syllables to remove the subjectivity I had Ia utter a repeating sequence of syllables rst with ta and then with a which