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A Grammar of Tommo So Dogon Language Family Mali Laura McPherson UCLA Draft dated 10/23/11 Not finished or definitive, use caution in citing. Chapters 1-20 revised, later chapters await revision and in some cases writing. Supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS-0537435, the J. William Fulbright Institute of International Education, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [email protected] 1 1. Introduction 1.1 Dogon languages The Dogon language family is made up of around 20 languages, and it is currently thought to constitute its own branch of the Niger-Congo phylum (Blench XXX). The languages are spoken on the plains and mountains in the eastern part of Mali’s Région de Mopti, with small crossover into Burkina Faso. The internal classification of the language family is not yet clear, for there are not yet enough detailed grammars of the constituent languages; the Dogon Language Project, under whose auspices I have prepared this grammar, aims to fill this gap. In the absence of genetic classification, the following table summarizes our current understanding of the Dogon language family based on geographic distribution: (xx) Northern Northeast Ben-Tey (Heath, m.s.) Jamsay (Heath 2008) Northwest Najamba (Heath, m.s., Hantgan xxx) Kindige North central Nanga (Heath, m.s.) Yanda-dom (Heath, m.s.) Central North central Tommo So (McPherson, m.s.) Donno So (xxx) South central Togo-Kan (Heath, m.s.) Eastern Sangha So1 (Calame-Griaule 1968, Moran, m.s.) Yorno So (Heath, m.s.) Western Mombo (Prokhorov, m.s.) Ampari (Prokhorov, m.s.) 1 Also called Toro So. 2 Dogulu-dom Tomo-Kan … This should not be understood as representing genetic similarity. For example, despite the fact that Tommo So and Dogulu Dom fall into the same geographic location, Tommo So bears a closer relation to Nanga or Najamba, while Dogulu Dom bears a closer relation to Mombo and Ampari. MAP 1.2 Tommo So Tommo So /tɔm̀ mɔ ̀ sɔɔ̀ /́ is a Central Dogon language spoken on the plateau between Douentza and Bandiagara by an estimated 40,000-60,000 people (Hochstedtler et al. 2007). The name itself is made up of the name of the ethnic group Tommo /tɔm̀ mɔ/́ and the word for language /sɔɔ̀ /́. The communes of Ningari /niŋari/, Mory /mori/, Tédié /teeʥe/, Dè /dɛ/, Ondogu /óndógú/, Kani Goguna /kànì gógúná/ and Kéndié /kèɲʥé/ constitute the heart of Tommo territory. Each of these communes have a market whose lingua franca is Tommo So. Other nearby languages include Bɔndu-Sɔ (made up of Najamba and Kindige) to the northwest, Nanga and Jamsay to the east, and Dulɔ-Sɔ to the west. Donno So, Dogulu Dom…. Tommo So’s closest relative is Donno So, spoken in and around the major market town of Bandiagara. In fact, until recently, Tommo So has not been listed as a separate language in Ethnologue, simply due to the fact that Donno So was documented earlier by Catholic missionaries (CITE). While the two languages are mutually intelligible, particularly those dialects of Tommo So closest to Bandiagara (e.g. Kani Gogouna), the data I have seen suggest that Donno So is an intermediate step between two poles formed by Tommo So and Sangha So (Toro So). Furthermore, Tommo So is a culturally important language to the Dogon people, seen as one of the main or original varieties of spoken Dogon, and many Dogon songs are in Tommo So regardless of the language of the village where they are sung (Hochstedtler et al. 2007). 1.3 Environment Tommo villages are all located on the plateau of a rocky inselberg mountain between Douentza and Bandiagara and generally cannot be reached by paved roads. The 3 most efficient way of reaching most villages is by motorcycle, though the area can be navigated by 4x4 vehicle via Dogani or Bandiagara. The landscape consists of areas with large boulders interspersed with pebbly or clayey plains and punctuated by small densely wooded copses. The climate is arid, with a rainy season between June and September, when millet (Pennisetum glaucum) is cultivated along with other minor crops such as sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), cow-pea (Vigna unguiculata), sesame (Sesamum indicum), roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa in red and green varieties), okra (Hibiscus esculentus), peanut (Arachis hypogaea), and groundnut (Vigna subterranea). Wild fruits such as the shea fruit (Vitellaria paradoxa), wild grapes (Lannea microcarpia), and zaba (Saba senegalensis) are also harvested throughout the year. Aside from farming, Tommo people also do a small amount of herding of sheep, goats and cows. Most of the herding knowledge appears to have originated with the Fulani people, indicated by the near total lack of native Dogon words for practices of animal husbandry. Large game animals have mostly disappeared from the region, but small mammals, such as hedgehogs, mongooses, and dassies, as well as many species of birds and reptiles still thrive. In the dry season, there are few ponds or other sources of water; wells and pumps provide water to most villages in the region. Thus, plant life is confined for most of the year to those trees and shrubs not requiring much water, such as the doum palm, indigo, baobab, and a few species of Acacia trees. When the rains arrive, the sandy soil bursts to life with many varieties of grasses, and Ipomoeia flowers line the banks of nascent streams. 1.4 Language use and vitality 1.5 Tommo So sources 1.5.1 Previous work To my knowledge, the only scholarly work published on the grammar of Tommo So is Dogon (1995), written by Vladimir Plungian for the Languages of the World series. While providing a good introduction to the language, his work is based on the dialect spoken around XXX, which differs slightly from the dialect discussed here, and he does not mark tone, a key grammatical feature of all Dogon languages. Several articles have appeared over the last 50 years that mention Tommo So (often under the name Tombo-Sɔ) among other dialects of Dogon, including several by Plungian. For a detailed bibliography, see Hantgan (2007). In terms of lexical work, the Direction Nationale de l'Alphabétisation Fonctionnelle et de la Linguistique Appliquée (D.N.A.F.L.A., now known as the Institut National des 4 Langues – Abdoulaye Barry) has published Elements de Terminologie Dogon (1984) based on Tommo So, and several other articles provide limited wordlists (CITE). 1.5.2 Current fieldwork The data in this grammar are from work with speakers from the commune of Tédié (villages of Tongo-Tongo and Anji) from June 2008 to February 2012. Elicitation was done both in situ and in the nearby towns of Douentza and Sévaré with consultants from Tédié. Recordings were made using a Zoom H4 digital recorder and analyzed using Praat (CITE). In addition to notebooks, data were stored in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Filemaker Pro, and Excel was used to plot vowel formants. 1.5.3 Acknowledgements Funding for this research is provided by National Science Foundation grant PA 50643-04, “Dogon languages of Mali” (DATES), the J. William Fulbright Institute for International Education (2008-2009), and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2010-2013) with the support of the Institut National des Langues – Abdoulaye Barry in Bamako. I would also like to thank the UCLA Department of Linguistics, in particular Bruce Hayes and Russell Schuh, for their advice and encouragement for this project. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Jeffrey Heath for getting me involved in this project. Without his support and unending knowledge, this work would not be what it is today. Also thanks to Seydou Moro, Minkailou Djiguiba and Oumar Koné for their assistance in establishing contacts and getting me to the village, to Kirill Prokhorov for collaboration and company, and to Abbie Hantgan, for unquestioning support and friendship over the years. I am very grateful to the chief and people of Tongo-Tongo for taking this strange American into their village. Special thanks to Ramata Ouologuèm, my main consultant, for her patience, eagerness, and friendship, and to her father Sana ‘M. le Maire’ Ouologuèm for his guidance, wisdom, and prolific knowledge of the Tommo people’s language and history. Thank you as well to my consultant in Sévaré Issa Toloba, without whom this grammar would not be here. Many thanks as well to Ajuma Guindo and Zakaria Ouologuèm for additional help and perspective. Finally, thank you to my family and friends who continued to support me on all of my trips to Mali. I am deeply indebted. 5 6 2 Grammatical Sketch This chapter will provide an introduction to the main grammatical features of Tommo So, all of which will be covered more in depth later in the grammar. 2.1 Phonology 2.1.1 Segmental inventory and phonotactics The phonemic inventory of Tommo So consists of 18 consonants, including nasalized sonorant /yn/, and 7 vowels, for which length and nasalization are contrastive. ATR and backness harmony is present in stems and to a lesser extent between stems and derivational affixes; inflectional affixes are outside the domain of both kinds of harmony. Harmony is discussed in section XXX. Unlike some Dogon languages, /l/ and /r/ are contrastive, but neither liquid occurs in word-initial position. Only sonorant consonants can serve as codas. The transcription system used in this grammar is a modified form of IPA. The divergences are intended to make it closer to standard orthographies in use for other West African languages like Bambara. Thus, affricate /ʥ/ will be written ‘j’, tap /ɾ/ as ‘r’, and /j/ as ‘y’, while long vowels will be written as two consecutive vowels (‘aa’ rather than /aː/). Nasalization will be marked with a superscript n {vn} to distinguish it from nasal codas; this also ensures maximum visibility of tone marking, since the use of tilde would require stacking diacritics. 2.1.2 Tonal inventory and tonotactics Like all Dogon languages, Tommo So is tonal, with tonal primitives H[igh] and L[ow], marked {v́} and {v̀}, respectively. It also has two contour tones, <LH> rising ({v̌} or {v̀v́}) and <HL> falling ({v̂} or {v́v̀}), though instances of the latter are rare. Tommo So lacks the “bell-shaped tone” (following Heath 2008) <LHL> characteristic of other Dogon languages such as Jamsay or Nanga, but it does maintain a three-way contrast between H, L and toneless, with the latter constrainted to clitics and certain suffixes (McPherson 2011). Native Tommo So stems all have one of two melodies: {H} or {LH}, but loanwords have introduced {HL} and {LHL} tone melodies into the lexicon. {HLH} is not a licit surface melody. Word-level tone melodies can be overwritten in certain grammatical 7 contexts; these changes are listed at the end of this sub-section and described in depth in Chapter 3. Intonation plays an important role in some Dogon languages (e.g. the “dying quail” intonation in Jamsay, Heath 2008), but this does not seem to be true for Tommo So. Nonetheless, certain words or constructions have intonational pitch-raising, such as [kɛḿ́ ] ‘all’ and the ‘you’d better not’ type of threat. 2.1.3 Key phonological alternations One salient feature of Tommo So phonology is the variable epenthesis of [u] after sonorants. While Plungian (1995) lists sun as nàmú, most of the speakers in Tédié will say simply nǎm. On other words, like ‘white’, they may vary, pronouncing either pílu or píl. The fact that the vowel is epenthetic is clear from the fact that it is toneless and does not harmonize with the stem. This will be discussed further in section XXX. Another phonological process is rhotic dissimilation, where an r-initial suffix after a syllable in the stem containing /r/ will dissimilate to [l]. For example, the stem góró ‘hat’ with the transitive suffix -rV will, in the Sarédina dialect, become gòrí-ló ‘put a hat (on a child)’ rather than the expected gòrí-ró. The Tédié dialect does not use this verb. For more on rhotic dissimilation, see section XXX. Vowel harmony is also a key feature of the vowel system in Tommo So, but this too is variable. Specifically, the levels of harmony of derivational suffixes on verbs correlate with how close the suffix is to the stem in terms of affix order. On a given day, the speaker may pronounce the very same verb with or without harmony. For exampleː (xx) pɔń ní-yɔ ́~ pɔń ní-yɛ ́ ‘put on pants’ Section XXX treats this variation. A final phonological effect to note is that like other Dogon languages like Jamsay (Heath 2008), Tommo So shows the effects of a single left-aligned trochee, in that the second syllable, particularly in longer words, tends to be metrically weak. This results in both vowel syncope and vowel reduction. For examples and discussion, see section XXX. 2.1.4 Key tonal changes Grammatical tone permeates the system in Tommo So, with typically word level tone changes in both the nominal and verbal realms. The following summarizes some possible tonal overlays: 8 Overlaid all L (“tone lowering”) - NP as head of a relative clause - Relative participle before demonstrative - NP before adjective or demonstrative - Possessed NP following full NP (non-pronominal) possessor - First noun in canonical and synthetic compounds - Second noun in pseudogenitive compounds - Verb stem before perfect negative suffix Overlaid all H - Singular affirmative imperative of most verbs - Inalienably possessed nouns (1-2 morae) with a pronominal possessor - Verbal stem in gerundive compounds - Certain infinitives Overlaid HL - Perfective and negative relative participles - Possessed kinship terms (3+ morae) with a pronominal possessor - Verb stems in the imperfect affirmative Overlaid LH - Verb stems in the imperfect negative - Certain infinitives 2.2 Verbal Inflection The basic word order is SOV; the inflected verb (be that auxiliary or otherwise) comes at the end of the sentence. Like nominal stems, verb stems in Tommo So belong to one of two tonal classes: either all {H} or {LH} with the L on the first syllable or mora (on monosyllabic verbs). In the rare monomoraic verbs, {LH} surfaces as simply {L} in the absence of a second mora. Depending on the inflection, the {H} may surface on the following suffix. Which tone pattern a verb stem will take is partially predictable by the first consonant, with voiced obstruent-initial stems taking {LH}, voiceless obstruent- and vowel-initial stems taking {H}, and sonorant-initial stems lexically listed. As indicated in section 2.1.4, the lexical tone of the stem is often overridden by grammatical tone patterns when inflected. I will discuss this in conjunction with verbal inflectional paradigms below. 9 The basic form of the verb in main clauses is as follows: (xx) [stem- (derivational suffix(es))] – aspect/negation – pronominal subject The verb is obligatorily inflected for subject agreement, using the following suffixes: (xx) 1sg -m 1pl -y 2sg -w 2pl -y 3sg -ø 3pl (-N) I have placed the 3pl suffix in parentheses because there is no one suffix that surfaces in each inflected form. Rather, the 3pl seems to have at least some nasal element that morphs and fuses with the aspectual suffix. Inflection of a verb generally changes it in one of three ways: by 1) changing its tonal pattern, 2) changing the final vowel of the stem and 3) adding a discrete suffix. Because these three are intertwined, it is hard to simply list the forms without comment. Thus, I will briefly discuss aspectual categories in the affirmative followed by a section on negation in each of these aspects. For the full treatment of aspect and verbal inflection, see Chapter 11. 2.2.1 Aspect There are two perfective forms for each verb, one of which changes the final vowel of the stem to /-aa/ and the other of which changes it to one of three classes: 1) +ATR /e/, 2) -ATR /ɛ/, or 3) neutral /i/, which sometimes surfaces as [u] before a labial consonant. If the stem is two syllables or less and the final vowel is a mid vowel, then it will necessarily also become a front mid-vowel agreeing in ATR value with the stem. However, if the final vowel is not a mid-vowel, it is unpredictable whether it will become a mid-vowel or a high vowel, and if mid, its ATR value is also unpredictable. Stems with three or more syllables always take /i/ as the perfect vowel. The two perfective forms differ in their tonal contours as well. The /-aa/ form has no effect on the lexical tone of the stem, except perhaps in monosyllabic {LH} verbs, in which case it may become all low if the auxiliary can take the H. The second perfective form, however, does change the tone of the stem. If the verb is defocalized, it undergoes tone lowering (its tone is overwritten with {L}). If it is focused and reduplicated, it takes {HL} with a L-toned initial reduplicant. If it is the relative participle, it also takes {HL}. 10