Tübatulabal is a Uto-Aztecan language, traditionally spoken in Kern County, California, United States. It is the traditional language of the Tübatulabal, who have switched to English. The language originally had three main dialects: Bakalanchi, Pakanapul and Palegawan.
In English, the name Tübatulabal refers to both the Tübatulabal people and their language. However, in the language itself, the term Tübatulabal refers only to the Tübatulabal people. Its origin is unclear, but it may be related to the noun stem "pine nuts". The Tübatulabal term for the Tübatulabal language is .
Phonology Vowels There are six phonemic vowels in Tübatulabal:
Front Central Back High Mid Low
Contrastive short and long versions of each vowel are found in both stressed and unstressed syllables. The vowels have various allophones which occur in different environments, most notably more central lax allophones when the vowels are short and occur in unstressed syllables. i and u can occur as the second member of a diphthong with any other vowel, resulting in ten possible diphthongs (Voegelin reports that ɨu is rare). Phonologically, the members of a diphthong are treated as distinct segments. For example, the common initial reduplication process, which copies the first stem vowel, copies only the first member of a diphthong, e.g.:
'the sucker fish' 'the many suckers in one place'
Vowel length is contrastive. However, according to , in the suffixing morphology length is typically predictable. In most cases, the first suffix is short, the second suffix is long, the third suffix is short, and so on. For example, the verbal stem 'to eat' can be expanded to 'let us go and pretend to eat'. In this word, each suffix alternates in length compared to its neighbors. When arranged differently, the same suffixes will have different lengths. Thus compare 'let us' with the realization of the same morpheme in 'let us go eat'.
Tübatulabal consonants show a basic voicing distinction, with a corresponding alternately voiced phoneme present for almost every obstruent. Tübatulabal voiceless consonants are unaspirated, like those in English after an initial /s/, e.g. as in 'spin', 'stiff', 'skin'.
Non-contrastive allophones of all vowels occur, usually when a vowel follows a nasal consonant, and especially when it also precedes a glottal consonant.
Consonants Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive voiceless voiced Fricative Approximant
All consonants except the glottal stop can occur as geminates. Gemination is often phonologically predictable.See Jensen for discussion of the role of "2.6 Gemination" in Tubatulabal phonology. ( et seq) In particular, all consonants except the voiced stops and the glottal stop geminate when following a short vowel. All stops and affricates are geminated in word-final position, regardless of the length of the preceding vowel.
Prosody Tübatulabal has predictable word stress, which is tied to morphological constituency and syllable weight. Primary stress falls on the final syllable of the stem. Secondary stress is assigned right to left from the final syllable, falling on every other mora:
"he is wanting to roll string on his thigh"See Jensen for discussion of the arbitrary behavior of glottal stops in stress assignment. The glottal stop, which is not otherwise counted as a mora, is counted as a mora for the purpose of stress assignment. . "the fruit is mashing"
Words with the form VːCVCV will be stressed as ˌVːCVˈCV:
"the pine-nut pole"
For the purposes of stress assignment, two identical short vowels that are separated only by a glottal stop are treated as a single vowel if and only if they belong to the same morpheme:
"the little one"
Orthography
Transcriptions in this article follow the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Much published material concerning Tübatulabal uses the Americanist orthography. In addition, the most important linguistic work on Tübatulabal, the original grammatical description of the language, uses a somewhat different orthography.
Voegelin writes the following as:
He also uses a number of special symbols for vocalic allophones. is an allophone of (IPA ) is an allophone of is an allophone of (IPA ) is an allophone of both and
The letter in the name Tübatulabal represents the central unrounded vowel .
In , Voegelin notes: "the University of California Press replaced my back high open manuscript vowel [ʊ] by Greek mu (sic!), and placed an inverted wedge over [o] to indicate my open [ɔ]."
Morphology There are three basic word types in Tübatulabal: verbs, nouns, and particles. Verbs may be formed from verbal stems or from noun stems with verbalizing morphology; similarly, nouns can be formed from noun stems or from verbal stems with nominalizing morphology. Particles have their own stems, but they have comparatively little inflection, whereas both verbs and nouns tend to be very morphologically complex.
There are four word-formation processes in Tübatulabal: suffixation, reduplication, conjunction and compounding.
Suffixation
Suffixation is the most common and productive process in agglutinative word-formation. Suffixes form a closed class and occur in a fixed order according to the word type.
Reduplication
There are two kinds of reduplication: full reduplication and partial reduplication. Full reduplication is the less common type and marks the iterative aspect in verbs.
Partial reduplication can occur as initial or final reduplication. Final reduplication is very rare and always expresses the idea of plural allegiance. It is also apparently limited to occurring with noun stems or suffixes that end in . Voegelin illustrates with an example:
'his hunting partner' 'his hunting partner (in the sense that the partner referred to, being very proficient, has many companions in hunting)'
Initial reduplication is far more productive. It is used to express collective plurality in nouns and to express aspect reversal in verbs. Initial reduplication prefixes a copy of the first vowel of the stem (as well as any immediately following nasal), preceded by a fixed . The underlying stem-initial consonant (if any) may also undergo changes, particularly in voicing and length. Some examples illustrate the reduplication process:
Base form glossBase formReduplicated formto eatto get downto be tiredthe duck
Conjunction Conjunction involves the combination of a particle with a word of another type. According to Voegelin, the behavior of particles is similar to that of enclitics in other Uto-Aztecan languages but distinct enough from them that it should not be considered to be a kind of cliticization.
Compounding Compounding appears to have been a much more productive process at an earlier stage of the language. It now has very limited productivity, and in many cases, it appears to have been completely lexicalized if it occurs.
Verb morphology Each verb stem has an unpredictable inherent aspect value (either telic or atelic; by default, a bare stem is inherently atelic), and an inherent value for transitivity (transitive, intransitive or impersonal). The inherent values can be changed by morphological addition to yield a verb stem with any of the other possible values. Aspect reversal is indicated by initial reduplication. Transitivity change is indicated by the use of one (or more) of a number of derivational suffixes with which verbs are constructed.
The full verb structure can be summarized as (A) + B + (C) + (D), where B is the verb root, and the other positions (all optional) represent classes of morphemes. A indicates initial reduplication, which can occur only once per word. C indicates a class of derivational morphemes, which can be divided into ten ordered positions, each of which allows at most one morpheme per word. D is the final position; there are nine possible morphemes in final position, but only one can occur in any single word.
The C class morphemes are given with examples in the table below. When these morphemes co-occur in a word, they must occur in the order given. They have a different effect depending on the inherent transitivity of the verb root, as well as the presence of other transitivity-changing morphology.
SuffixGlossExamplecausative's/he is coughing (through the agency of a crumb)'benefactive's/he is crawling to the woman' (perhaps in the sense of "he is crawling there for the erotic benefit of the woman")/-/-/movement's/he ate it here and went away'distributive's/he dug first here, then there'pretending to's/he wants to go along pretending he is crying'desiderative's/he is on the verge of learning about it'future'it will get plugged up'passive's/he is being licked' (e.g. kitten by mother cat)collective-intensive'they will speak Tübatulabal'similative'it seems to be ripening'
The possible verbal final morphemes (class D) are shown below. Unlike the class C morphemes, only one of these final-position morphemes can occur in any single word. Therefore, the ordering of morphemes in this table does not indicate anything about a linear relationship among the morphemes.
Suffix/suffix typeGlossExampleNominalizers – 'my partner in rattling for it (the dance)'Subordinaters – 's/he is eating while talking'Imperatives – 'hunt the deer after a while'present tense's/he is asking me'exhortative'let's dig it'permissive's/he might get jealous'past habituative's/he used to make lace'irrealis's/he should have dodged'adversative's/he is making it full (despite the fact that the thing to be filled is very large)'
Noun morphology
All nouns (whether derived from verb stems or noun stems) are obligatorily marked as absolute or relative. Nouns must also be marked with one of the three basic cases: subject, object, or genitive. Relative nouns make a finer distinction between suus and ejus objects and genitives. In addition to this obligatory morphology, nouns may also receive suffixes indicating several secondary cases (inessive, ablative, allative and instrumental) as well as many other derivational suffixes.
Nouns may be divided into three basic classes according to their stem shape and morphological behavior and sometimes according to their semantic contribution as well. The basic test for classification is how the noun occurs when it is absolute. The absolute suffix has a different allomorph when it occurs with a noun from each of these classes. Class A nouns all have vowel-final stems, and add the absolute suffix as -l. Class B noun stems may be vowel-final or consonant-final, but in either case the absolute suffix is -t. Class C is a small class of nouns, many of which are kinship terms or other inalienable nouns. The absolute noun is phonologically null when it occurs with class C nouns.The morphological differences between noun classes can probably be traced back to a simple case of allomorphy. At a certain point in the history of an ancestor of Tübatulabal, all class A nouns ended in a vowel, while all class B nouns ended in a consonant. (Class C forms are few in number and have a more complicated origin.) The absolute suffix in this language was *-t, which lenited intervocalically, leading to -l in Tübatulabal class A nouns (compare cognates in Serrano, in Tongva.) See and .
Each of the classes can be subdivided into two or more classes, depending on phonological differences in the noun stem that lead to divergent behavior in certain case forms.
Class A stems end with a long vowel stems end with a short vowel Class B stem ends in a short vowel stem ends in a long vowel stem ends in n stem ends in m stem ends in a voiceless consonant Class C nouns which take an overt relative suffix nouns with no overt relative suffix