1 Slightly edited from a Presentation at North East Indian Linguistic Society Eighth International Conference Guwahati, Jan 31 – 2 Feb 2014 Front unrounded vowels in Denjongke 1 (Sikkimese Bhutia): an acoustic study with a historical note Juha Yliniemi University of Helsinki, Sikkim University Denjongke, also known as Lhoke, Sikkimese Bhutia or simply Sikkimese, is a Tibetic language spoken in Sikkim, India. This paper presents the results of an acoustic study of F1 values in front unrounded vowels the exact behavior of which was left somewhat unresolved in my previous study (Yliniemi 2005). Minimal triplets in the new data confirm that a three-way opposition /iː/ /eː/ /ɛː/ has to be posited but this opposition appears to be restricted to long vowels, whereas short vowels have only a two-way opposition. Comparison of example words with Written Tibetan rhymes provides an initial understanding of how Written Tibetan rhymes are reflected within Denjongke front unrounded vowels. 1. Introduction Describing vowels in Tibetic languages has been reported as challenging. In a phonetic study of five Tibetic languages, Watters (2002: 16) characterizes vowel qualities as "often quite elusive". Hari (1979: 28), on the other hand, finds analyzing Lhasa vowels as "far from straightforward" due to extensive vowel height approximation (also called vowel harmony, e.g. Sprigg 1961) in which the rounding and height of vowels are affected by adjacent vowels. A more specific problem, faced at least in some central and southern Tibetic languages, is the exact status of front unrounded vowels. Watters (2002: 16), for instance, calls /e/ and /ɛ/ "problematic" and continues that ”it isŶ’t alǁays Đlear ǁhether the ǀoǁel is /e/ or /ɛ/ in short vowels, and as such whether or not /ɛ/ occurs only iŶ loŶg ǀoǁels ǁhere it is Đlearly heard as suĐh.” Van Driem (1992: 66), on the other hand, posits a short /e/, a long /eː/ and an always long /ɛː/ for Dzongkha, but comments that the difference between /e/ and /eː/ is actually "more often one of timbre [=quality] than of length." Furthermore, Tournadre (2003: 35) describes /e/ and /ä/ (same as /ɛ/) as separate phonemes, but then comments on /e/ that when "followed by a consonant (closed syllable), it is pronounced like /ä/." These comments underline the complexity of analyzing front unrounded vowels in these Tibetic languages. I also encountered the problematic character of the front unrounded vowels in my initial phonological analysis on Denjongke (a Tibetic language spoken in Sikkim), where the analysis was left somewhat inconclusive. This was reflected in the phoneme chart (Table 1) of Yliniemi (2005) as /ɛ/ given in brackets. Front Middle Back Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Rounded Close i y u Mid e ø o Open (ɛ) ɐ Table 1: Denjongke phoneme chart from Yliniemi 2005. 1 The language is also known by the endonym Lhoke and exonyms (Sikkimese) Bhutia and Sikkimese. Previously, a sketch grammar of the language was written by Sandberg (1888, 1895). Later, Walsh (1905) and Shafer (1974) included word lists of Denjongke, and Grierson (1967 [1909]) offered some diachronic phonological observations. An initial phonological analysis of the language was presented in Yliniemi (2005).