Prosodic Contrasts and Segmental Analysis in Himalayan Languages

The connection between pitch, phonation and plosive voicing has been observed in many of the languages of the world, including those of the Himalayas. The paper examines different analyses of largely phonetically similar data from various Tibetan and Tamangic languages, comparing and evaluating the substantially different analyses offered in different descriptive traditions, arguing that principles of economy and descriptive adequacy allow us to choose between alternative analyses for many languages that have been described with different types of contrasts involving plosive manner and pitch height.