New Perspectives on the Suprasegmentals in mBrugchu Tibetan

mBrugchu Tibetan, a linguistic group of the Tibetic languages spoken in Zhouqu County, Gannan Prefecture, Gansu, is regarded as a tonal language in previous works. This paper shows that it does not have a distinction of tone in regards to pitch, but rather has prominent breathy phonation which has not yet obtained a phonological position as a suprasegmental and, instead, is merely one of the phonetic features of the voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/. The paper discusses two dialects, dGonpa and Ongsum; the breathy phonation of dGonpa is more prominent than that of Ongsum, this is because /ɦ/ plays a different role in each dialect and hence has different functions. (This article is in English.) 提要 分佈在甘肅省甘南州的一個獨立藏語方言群舟曲藏語在以往研究中被認為是個具有聲調對立的語言。但本文指出此藏語尚未有音高對立,并僅有以氣聲發聲態為主的超音段特徵,而且氣聲也還沒成為音系對立中的一部份而是個喉擦音/ɦ/的語音變體。本文討論舟曲藏語之兩個土話,即拱壩話及八楞話,其中氣聲在拱壩話比八楞話出現得更明顯。此差異源於/ɦ/在音系上的功能程度之別。