The Historical Phonology of Kriang, A Katuic Language

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society JSEALS Vol. 10.1 (2017): 114-139 ISSN: 1836-6821, DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52402 University of Hawaiʼi Press THE HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF KRIANG, A KATUIC LANGUAGE Ryan Gehrmann Payap University Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the historical phonology of the Kriang language (< Katuic < Austroasiatic). Kriang is spoken primarily in Sekong province, Laos and may be divided into two primary dialects which I call Kriang Kaleum and Kriang Tha Taeng. A synchronic analysis of Kriang phonology is provided based both on my own field work and on the data provided by previous researchers. A description of the historical phonological development from ProtoKatuic to modern Kriang follows emphasizing especially the development of prenasalized consonants, long/geminate consonants and vocalic register in the modern language. Of particular interest is the non-canonical register assignment pattern evident in certain Kriang varieties. Keywords: Kriang, Ngeq, Prenasalization, Gemination, Register, Registrogenesis ISO 639-3 codes: ngt 1 Introduction The Kriang are an Austroasiatic people of southern Laos who speak a language belonging to the Katuic language family. Sidwell (2005) classifies the Kriang language [ngt] as a language under his Ta’oi sub-group of Katuic. Kriang people are also called Ngkriang or Ngeq/Nyeq, the latter of which is a somewhat pejorative exonym derived from the Kriang word for ‘no’. Some Kriang people have accepted this exonym and use it themselves but others prefer the endonym Kriang, which, anecdotally at least, has its origin in the people’s habit of eating the fruit of the jambolan tree (syzygium cumini) during times of famine (Baird and Shoemaker 2008). The jambolan fruit is called /kɐllaj ŋkriaŋ/ in Kriang. The goal of this paper is to take a step forward in the documentation and phonological analysis of the Kriang language. First, a synchronic phonological description of the Kriang language is presented based on my own field work and the work of other researchers. Then, building on that foundation, the historical phonology of Kriang is investigated with special attention given to consonant prenasalization, consonant gemination and registrogenesis. 1.1 Available data and previous descriptions Up to now, only two resources on Kriang phonology have appeared in publication, both of which are quite limited in scope (R. Smith 1973a; Theraphan 2001). Supplementary observations on Kriang phonology are found in Huffman’s (1985) article on vocalic restructuring in register languages and in his unpublished notebooks, which have only recently been made available online thanks to the efforts of Paul Sidwell and Doug Cooper (Huffman 1971a).1 Kriang grammar is similarly poorly documented, with only one article on reduplication (R. Smith 1973b) and brief notes on the grammaticalization of the Kriang acquire verb in Enfield’s (2003) crosslinguistic investigation of the issue. As for the Kriang lexicon, the largest contribution has been R. Smith’s (1970) unpublished dictionary, which contains almost 4000 unique etyma and has been digitized for sealang.net’s Mon-Khmer Languages Project. Theraphan’s (2001) comparative phonological investigation of Katuic and Bahnaric includes substantial lexicons of Kriang and the closely related Chatong language, both of which are also available in 1 See http://sealang.net/archives/huffman Copyright vested in the author; Creative Commons Attribution Licence Ryan GEHRMANN | The Historical Phonology of Kriang, a Katuic Language | JSEALS 10.1 (2017) digital form on sealang.net.2 For unpublished resources, I had at my disposal Huffman’s (1971b, 1979b) word lists for two different Kriang varieties, one of which has been digitized on sealang.net, my own two original Kriang data sets (Gehrmann 2014b; 2014c) and an extensive unpublished lexicon of Kriang that I was subsequently involved in developing (Gehrmann et al. 2016). Finally, a useful non-linguistic publication is Baird and Shoemaker’s (2008) People, Livelihoods, and Development in the Xekong River Basin, Laos, from which information about the geographic location and sociolinguistic situation of Kriang speakers can be gleaned. 1.2 Dialectology Kriang has two primary dialects. The first, which I will call Kriang Kaleum (KK) 3 , is spoken in the mountainous region along the course of the Sekong River in western Kaleum district, Sekong province, Laos. The second, which I will call Kriang Tha Taeng (KTT) is spoken along the main road between the Tha Taeng district center and the provincial capital of Sekong (see the map in Figure 1). These two dialect communities are not geographically contiguous and have developed differently in some respects. From the data available, it would appear that KK, which is spoken in the Kriang homeland area, has developed in isolation and diversified internally, whereas KTT has been affected by close, prolonged contact with Alak, a Central Bahnaric language. Kriang is spoken primarily in western Sekong province, Laos, but smaller Kriang communities are found outside of this area as well in Salavan and Champasak provinces. The variety of Kriang spoken in these communities is almost without exception descended from KK, although there are a few KTT villages just over the border from Tha Taeng district in Pak Song district, Champasak province. North of Tha Taeng city, in Salavan district, Salavan province, there is a small group of Kriang villages. Kriang speakers in this area refer to their language as Kriang Khong or Kriang Tat, reflecting the names of local villages Ban Khiang Khong and Ban Khiang Tat Sung respectively. Their speech is the same as KK with only slight lexical differences (Feikje van der Haak, personal communication). KK speakers are also found in lowland Champasak province along the road north and south of Pakse, but they typically live in mixed villages and the long term survival of the language in this area is in doubt. A certain degree of internal diversity exists within the KK dialect as it is spoken in Kaleum district as well. Baird and Shoemaker (2008) note that, people divide Kriang into two dialect groups up in the ancestral homeland - one being spoken higher up in the mountains and the other down by the Sekong river. Furthermore, while Theraphan (2001) was doing field work in Kaleum district and working with a Kriang speaker from a mountain village, she was warned by certain townsfolk that this man spoke a strange variety of Kriang, different from the “pure” Kriang variety spoken in Kaleum town. Theraphan provides examples of lexical and pronunciation differences between the mountain dialect, which she calls Kriang of Hat Wi Village, and the town dialect, which she calls General Kriang, as shown in Table 1. Table 1: Lexical differences between two varieties of KK (Theraphan 2001) Hat Wi Kriang General Kriang /pahaːc/ /haŋkeɲ/ ‘sand’ /haːw/ /sɒk/ ‘ascend, climb’ /sua (...truncated)