Dzongkha

The connection between pitch, phonation and plosive voicing has been observed in many of the languages of the world, including those of the Himalayas. The paper examines different analyses of largely phonetically similar data from various Tibetan and Tamangic languages, comparing and evaluating the substantially different analyses offered in different descriptive traditions, arguing that principles of economy and descriptive adequacy allow us to choose between alternative analyses for many languages that have been described with different types of contrasts involving plosive manner and pitch height.

‘Review: Lauren Gawne and Nathan Wayne Hill (eds.): Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs, 302.) 472 pp. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017. £91. ISBN 978 3 11 046018 6. doi: 10.1017/S0041977X19000181’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 82 (1): 190-192.

Linguistics is the science of language. Language science describes and analyses language phenomena in order to understand how language works. In England, Sir Isaac Newton described the phenomenon of gravity and the physics of movement with his laws of motion and gravitation. He did not invent these laws in 1687. He merely discovered and formulated a few of the natural regularities that operate in the universe, illuminating rules by which Mother Nature herself abides. Neither King James II nor an Act of Parliament could have changed these laws of physics, nor could they have repealed the force of gravity even if they had wanted to do so. By the same token, each natural language has its own phonology. Th e phonology is a natural system within the living spoken language and is not a feature of the written language. A linguist can describe and accurately document the phonology of a language if he or she is up to the task, but a linguist cannot change the phonology of a language. Today neither Queen Elizabeth II nor an Act of Parliament at Westminster can change the phonology of the English language, and the same holds true in Bhutan for the phonology of spoken Dzongkha. Th us not only the government, but even the native speakers themselves cannot change the phonology of their own mother tongue. Th e sound system of a language does not change over the course of history because of any conscious decision on the part of the speakers to change the phonology. Instead the phonology of a language evolves naturally over time in accordance with so-called sound laws. Not all languages have a writing system, but each language has a phonology. We can either describe the sound system of a language accurately or we can fail to grasp its true nature, but we cannot tamper with the natural phonology of the spoken tongue.