Tuvan phonology

Consonants

Tuvan has 19 native consonant phonemes:

Consonant phonemes of Tuvan

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal		m	n		ŋ
Plosive	voiced1	b	d	ɟ	ɡ
	voiceless lenis1	p	t	c	k
	voiceless fortis1	pʰ	tʰ	cʰ	kʰ
Affricate			t͡s2	t͡ʃ
Fricative	voiceless	f2	s	ʃ	x
	voiced	v	z	ʒ	ɣ
Flap	central	ⱱ	ɾ
	lateral		ɺ		ʟ̆
Approximant	central	ʋ	ɹ	j	ɰ
	lateral		l		ʟ

1. The distinction between initial bilabial and alveolar stops is based on aspiration for most speakers and voicing for others.
2. /f/ and /ts/ are found in some Russian loanwords.

Vowels

Vowels in Tuvan exist in three varieties: short, long and short with low pitch. Tuvan long vowels have a duration that is at least (and often more than) twice as long as that of short vowels. Contrastive low pitch may occur on short vowels, and when it does, it causes them to increase in duration by at least a half. When using low pitch, Tuvan-speakers employ a pitch that is at the very low end of their modal voice pitch. For some speakers, it is even lower and using what is phonetically known as creaky voice. When a vowel in a monosyllabic word has low pitch, speakers apply low pitch only to the first half of that vowel (e.g. [àt] 'horse'). That is followed by a noticeable pitch rise, as the speaker returns to modal pitch in the second half of the vowel.

The acoustic impression is similar to that of a rising tone like the rising pitch contour of the Mandarin second tone, but the Tuvan pitch begins much lower. However, Tuvan is considered a pitch accent language with contrastive low pitch instead of a tonal language. When the low pitch vowel occurs in a multisyllabic word, there is no rising pitch contour or lengthening effect: [àdɯ] 'his/her/its horse'. Such low pitch vowels were previously referred to in the literature as either kargyraa or pharyngealized vowels. Phonetic studies have demonstrated that the defining characteristic of such vowels is low pitch. See Harrison 2001 for a phonetic and acoustic study of Tuvan low pitch vowels.

In her PhD thesis, "Long Vowels in Mongolic Loanwords in Tuvan", Baiarma Khabtagaeva states that the history of long vowels is ambiguous. While the long vowels may originate from Mongolic languages, they could also be of Tuvan origin. In most Mongolic languages, the quality of the long vowel changes depending on the quality of the second vowel in the conjunction. The only exception to this rule is if the conjunction is labial. The ancient Tuvan languages, in contrast, depended upon the first vowel rather than the second to determine the long vowels.

Khabtagaeva divided the transformation of these loanwords into two periods: the early layer and the late layer. The words in the early layer are words in which the Mongolic preserved the conjunction, the VCV conjunction was preserved but the long vowel still developed when it entered the Tuvan language, or the stress is on the last syllable and a long vowel in the loanword replaced a short vowel in the original word. The Late Layer includes loanwords in which the long vowel does not change when the word entered Tuvan.

Vowel phonemes of Tuvan

		Short			Long			Low pitch
		High	Mid	Low	High	Mid	Low	High	Low
Front	Unrounded	i	e	ɛ	iː	eː	ɛː	ì	è
	Rounded	y	ø	œ	yː	øː	œː	ỳ	ø̀
Central	Unrounded	ɘ	ɜ	æ	ɘː	ɜː	æː
	Rounded	ɵ	ɞ	ɒ	ɵː	ɞː	ɒː
Back	Unrounded	ɯ	ʌ	a	ɯː	ʌː	aː	ɯ̀	à
	Rounded	u	o	ɔ	uː	oː	ɔː	ù	ò

Vowels may also be nasalized in the environment of nasal consonants, but nasalization is non-contrastive. Most Tuvan vowels in word-initial syllables have a low pitch and do not contrast significantly with short and long vowels.

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony in Tuvan is exhibited in its phonology, subject-object-verb word order, head-final syntax and heavy use of multiverb constructions.

Tuvan has two systems of vowel harmony that strictly govern the distribution of vowels within words and suffixes. Backness harmony, or what is sometimes called 'palatal' harmony, requires all vowels within a word to be either back or front. Rounding harmony, or what is sometimes called 'labial' harmony, requires a vowel to be rounded if it is a high vowel and appears in a syllable immediately following a rounded vowel. Low rounded vowels [ø] [o] are restricted to the first syllable of a word, and a vowel in a non-initial syllable may be rounded only if it meets the conditions of rounding harmony (it must both be a high vowel [y] [u] and be preceded by a rounded vowel). See Harrison 2001 for a detailed description of Tuvan vowel harmony systems.

External links

• Tuvan language