Small group elicitation session, 9/15/2015

We worked with Harsha in the seminar room and tried to elicit minimal pairs to start hashing out an idea of the phonology of Bengali.  We asked for tongue twisters, puns, and rhyming words to try and find contrasts.  He also has a rap written in Bengali he would be willing to perform for us.  In particular, we wanted more information about aspiration, the r's, and the t's and d's, although we also looked at nasalization.

We have pretty strong evidence to suggest that aspiration in Bengali is usually contrastive, both from Harsha and several minimal pairs.  We already had found minimal pairs in the group elicitation session, but we added bʰɑt and bɑt to that list.  We did find, interestingly, that word-final aspiration is dropped frequently enough that it is not necessarily contrastive.  For example, 'sheʈ and 'sheʈʰ both mean the same thing, as do labʰ and lab.

If word-final aspiration does not contrast, we have an example of contrastive nasalization as well in bãdʰ, binding, and badʰ, "tie up" (inf, imperative).  The unimportance of word-final aspiration also implies that [p] and [b] contrast; we have the minimal pair pa and bah.  Nasals n and m also appear to contrast as nak means nose but mak, while it "sounds okay", does not have a meaning.

On the other hand, [pʰ] and [f] do not contrast, as we can have futo/pʰuto and pʰak/fak.  This is a common occurence in other languages, so it is likely a valid observation, although more evidence is always nice.

We searched for more evidence of the r's contrasting and found a few more minimal pairs:
gʰor¹a and gʰor²a, bar¹i and bar²i, and har¹, har², and har³.  All definitions are in the class dictionary.

We had difficulty finding differences between [t] and [ʈ], but Harsha did say we could use reduplication with [tʰ] if the initial consonant of the first word was [t].  For example, he gave us the word tokor and said tokor tʰokor was valid reduplication.  We were also able to find the minimal pair shet and 'sheʈ.

The tongue twisters Harsha gave us were pakʰi paka pepe kʰai, lit "bird ripe papaya eats", tshambadjarer 'shou.shi 'ba.bu   'shousha 'kʰete'khete        shurut kure     shoregælo, lit
off Shambazar, Shoushi  (title)  cucumber he was eating slipping sound  moves away"
Harsha told us some people would use [s] rather than [sh].  He gave us several more words as well, which can now be found in the dictionary.  We also noted that there was something odd going on with the [sh] that could have just been syllable-initial stress, although we weren't sure, and that very few words endd with ɖʰ.