October 6th, 2015, Small Group Meeting

We worked with Harsha this week, in the seminar room. During the first part of the session, we acquired some new vocabulary and attempted to re-elicit a (near-)minimal pair for the three /r/ phonemes.

Miscellaneous vocabulary additions:
     lom - fur  
     t͡ʃul - hair (on a person's head)
     fall/autumn - ʃɔrɔt
     vacation - t͡ʃʰuʈi

     tumi Fall Breaker t͡ʃʰuʈite kikort͡ʃʰo
     you Fall Break-GEN what doing
     "What are you doing over Fall Break?"

The /r/ near-minimal triplet:
     haɽʰ - bone
     har - defeat     haɽi - (clay) pot
          Harsha noted that here, if one was not enunciating clearly, it would sound indistinguishable from the first /r/, and that in casual speech the first /r/ is often used here. He also agreed that he and Paroma occasionally use different /r/s. 

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Mollie then looked at the behavior of calendar dates, days of the month, and the like. Her findings are below:

Initially, we noticed that there was a dedicated word for the first day of the month.
protom - first
proto'ma - first (of the month)
Harsha was telling us about a festival he was going to attend over fall break, durga pudja, which he mentioned was on the first of the month.
shoshti - sixth (of the month)

Other numbers followed a different pattern, with a suffix -oi used to denote count.
patsh - five
patsh-oi October - Fifth October
ater - 18
ater-oi March - 18th March
'un.tiɽish - 29
'un.tiɽish-e September - 29th September
29 does not follow the earlier pattern; however, Harsha did note that it sounded odd to him in Bengali, and he would be more likely to use English.  Furthermore, he found it more comfortable to say,
March-er    patsh tarik
March-GEN     five     date
"The fifth day of March"
 Note that the months are entirely English; Harsha told us there is a lunar calendar, so it would be worth examining this calendar further.

Also, we noticed there were multiple ways to say "two":
du    - two (inf)
dui   - two (neutral)
duto - two (formal)
Harsha told us the difference between them was entirely formality, but we have not seen this change so far in other numbers.  It would be worthwhile to go through numbers again in greater detail.

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We next examined the morphemes -er and -ke, the "genitive" and "animacy/definiteness" suffixes explored in class, to see how they interact with the phonology of the word they are suffixed to. We hypothesized that there may be vowel harmony in some instances, since such harmony was seen in some verb conjugations. We put together a list containing a set of words, with a variety of phonemes, to which we could add the suffixes.

The following things were presented as entities that might spontaneously sprout hair. Harsha was asked to describe the hair on this creature, producing the form "X lom" or "X t͡ʃul". The word X for each item in the list is presented below, consisting of the noun itself and a form of the -er suffix.

     poʃu (animal) - poʃur
     ʃɔd͡ʒaru (porcupine) - ʃɔd͡ʒarur     tiktiki (gecko) - tiktikir
     makoɽʃa (spider) - makoɽʃar
     kona (corner) - konar
     dike (direction) - diker     kɔrgoʃ (rabbit) - kɔrgoʃer
     hãʃ (duck) - hãʃer
     ĩdur (mouse) - ĩdurer
     gʰar (neck) - gʰarer 
     pa (leg/foot) - paer

Though there does not appear to be any vowel harmony occurring here. The genitive suffix is not always -er, but -r after vowels; this was noted in previous sessions, but is made clear here with examples of its occurrence after a variety of vowels. Most notable is its behavior with pa (leg/foot); rather than becoming par, as we might expect from the suffix's interaction with vowels, it becomes paer. This may be a restriction on the syllable count of multi-morphemic words, but a closer look with more single-syllable, vowel-final nouns and more single-syllable, vowel-initial suffixes will be required to know for certain what is happening here.

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Next, Sam presented the following things as entities to which they were giving a pencil, and placed in the sentence "Sam X pencilta dilo", where X would end in the -ke "indirect object" suffix. Here, the idea was to see how the -ke suffix behaves when the stem it affixes to is voiced, aspirated, or the same as it. It was hypothesized that gemination may occur of a stem-final /k/ when followed by this suffix.

     nak* (nose) - nakke (no gemination - a separate release for each stop)
     ʃuʃukʰ (dolphin) - ʃuʃukʰke
     piʈʰ (back) - piʈʰke      bagʰ (tiger) - bagʰke

The -ke suffix does not appear to change in response to the final consonant of the stem. When that consonant is also a /k/, the result is two /k/s in separate syllables, each with their own release, rather than a geminate /k/. There is also no voicing or aspiration assimilation between the final stem consonant and the /k/ in the suffix.

* Note that Mollie and Sam are disputing whether the /k/ at the end of /nak/ (nose) is aspirated; I have it here as non-aspirated, but it may very well be aspirated, which may (or may not) have an effect on the behavior of the -ke suffix. We plan to check this in Praat before this data is used on our phonology papers, and recommend that others do the same.

Further things to examine:
   - The locative -e suffix's behavior with vowel-final stems
   - Interactions between suffixes (tar from ta-er)
   - Must multi-morphemic words also be multi-syllabic? Why pa-er > paer, not pa-er > par?
   - Lunar calendar and designated words for particular dates
   - Formality distinctions in number or possibly marking for the object counted

We also recorded the Bengali rap that Harsha wrote. The file for this session has the complete thing, and it may be useful in hearing phonological interactions across word boundaries. We have not transcribed the entire rap (phonologically - we do not currently have the vocabulary or understanding of the grammar required to gloss or translate it) but it is available, and will be separated from the rest of the session audio file for convenience, at which point the link will be posted here: *have not done this yet*