Chapter 2

Contrastive Phonology

Kurtöp phonology has been described in depth in several publications, first

in Michailovsky & Mazaudon (1994) and then later in more detail in Hyslop
(2006, 2008b, 2009). The current discussion on phonology summarizes these
previous findings and includes an updated analysis. The data presented in this
chapter is in IPA while the following chapters use the practical orthography
(described in §2.6).
The organization of this chapter is as follows: §2.1 presents the consonantal
phonemes, beginning with the obstruents and then discussing sonorants; §2.2
shows the distribution of consonants in complex onsets; while §2.3 discusses
their distribution as codas. §2.4 discusses vowels and §2.5 discuss supraseg-
mental features, namely tone and vowel length. The final section, §2.6, intro-
duces the practical orthography, which will be used from chapter 3 on.

2.1 Consonant Phonemes

Kurtöp contrasts fifteen stops, three fricatives, two affricates, two laterals, one
rhotic, four nasals, two glides and a glottal aspirate, shown in Table 21. A sub-
set of the Kurtöp consonant phonemes may be combined to make complex
onsets; these are illustrated in Figure 9.

Table 2 Kurtöp consonant phonemes

Labial Dental Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal

stops p, pʰ, b t, tʰ, d ʈ, ʈʰ, ɖ c, cʰ, ɟ k, kʰ, g (ʔ)

affricates ts, tsʰ
fricatives s, z ç h
nasals m n ɲ ŋ
laterals l, l̥

1 The use of parentheses with the glottal stop indicates this segment has not been found to be
phonemically contrastive; it only precedes vocalic high-toned initials and occurs occasion-
ally in place of coda /k/. The glottal stop should not be confused with orthographic <’>, used
to represent a high tone. See §2.6.2.

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Contrastive Phonology 31

Labial Dental Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal

rhotics r
glides w j

2.1.1 Obstruents
Kurtöp stops make a three-way VOT (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated,
voiced) contrast at five places of articulation, as shown in Table 2. There is a
two-way VOT contrast amongst the affricates (aspirated and unaspirated) and
the dental fricatives (voiced and voiceless), while the palatal fricative occurs
only voiceless synchronically (see §2.5.1 for a description of a recent histori-
cal sound change which has collapsed a previous voiced/voiceless distinction).
With the exception of the voiceless palatal fricative, which can co-occur with
both high and low tone, I am treating the pitch on the vowel following the
obstruents as part of the voicing contrast.

2.1.1.1 Stops
The contrast between the stops is illustrated by the near-minimal set in
Table 32.

Table 3 Minimal set showing Kurtöp stops

Phoneme Example Gloss

/p/ pɐ́: ‘slice.of.meat’

/pʰ/ pʰɐ́ʔ ~ pʰɐ́k ~ pʰɐ́: ‘pig’
/b/ bɐ̀ ‘target’

2 The examples are not perfect minimal pairs for the following reasons. As described in §2.5.1,
tone in Kurtöp is phonemically contrastive on initial syllables following sonorant onsets.
Following most (all except the palatal fricative) obstruents, pitch is predictably high if the
onset is voiceless and low if the onset is voiced; in other words, I treat the “voicing” contrast
as a bundle of acoustic features, involving, minimally, voice onset time and pitch on the fol-
lowing vowel. Other than different pitch, one may also note that in some cases a long vowel
or vowel plus coda is contrasted with a short vowel. Despite these differences, the data suffice
to show the contrast made between the different stop types.