アカ語の音素体系 : タイ国北部における山地民アカ族の言語の記述的研究

Abstract

The Akha language in Northern Thailand is a language of a hill tribe belonging to the Burmese-lolo group of the Tibeto-Burman branch. Its linguistic survey had not been made before our research. As far as we can tell, the Akha tribe is found in the following five areas : 1. Southern Yunnan, mainly in the Sipsong panna area. 2. Eastern Shan state, mainly in the Kengtung area. 3. Northern Laos, mainly in the Phongsaly area. 4. Northwestern Laos, mainly in the Muongsing area. 5. Northern Thailand, mainly in Amphur Maesai and Maechan, Chiengrai province. From October to December 1964, I was able to research the Akha language in Northern Thailand, as part of our linguistic research project of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University. This paper is a first attempt to describe the Akha language, spoken in the Saenchai village (with about 50 houses), situated 25 km. Northwest of Maechan city, Chiengrai province. The intention here is to show briefly the phonemic structure of the language. The Akha language (of Saenchai) posseses the following simple phonemic system : Twenty nine single consonants :

k kh g [gɦ]ʔ: p ph b [bɦ]: t th d [dɦ]: ts tsh dz [dzɦ] : tš tšh dž [dʒɦ] : s z š j : h ɦ x ɣ : η m n ň l/ ; four consonant clusters :

pj phj bj [bɦj] mj [mɦj]/; nine vowels :

i e ɸ œ u o ɯ ɣ a/; and three tonemes :

high [55] middle [33] low [11]/. The middle tone [33] often occurs with glottal stricture. The low tone is accompanied by a slight falling glide at the end and becomes a low level-falling [221] type. Each syllable consists of a consonant, or cluster, plus a vowel, spoken on one of the three tonemes. The phoneme /m/ (syllabic m) may occur in the vowel position. The minimal free forms of the language are monosyllables (CV). A word consists of one, two or three morphemes. The second type is predominant and the third is rare. An important characteristic of this language is that, besides the tone system, the forms may or may not receive a stress. This stressing or not of a syllable is determined automatically by its position within a sequence of two syllables. For example, the morpheme [ʃɛ:55] in the word [k'ɯ11 ʃɛ:55] <flea> receives a stress, is long, and is said at a high tone. Whereas, the same morpheme in the word [ʃɛ11 mɔ:55] <louse> does not receive a stress, is short, and is said at a low tone. From this example, we can see that vowel length is not distinctive in the language. Since change in tone often occurs, words consisting of two morphemes have only the following five possibilities of toneme sequence (This does not apply, however, when the second member of the morpheme sequence is /ɦɯ/). [Table omitted] On the examples see P. 8 It is interesting to see how this indicates that the language is in the process of changing from a syllabic-tone type to a word-tone type. Together with this paper, there is an Akha-English glossary, which was collected by the writer in cooperation with Mr. Makio Katsura and described according the phonemic system explained above.