The Big Tonogenesis

This upcoming week marks the beginning of drafting my thesis, and I could not be more thrilled and intimidated by my own shortcomings as someone who does not speak an Athabaskan language. I will be focusing on tonal polarity, a strange and exciting phenomenon within the Athabaskan family. I love this work.

I’ve written on this blog a few times how I never expected to be doing thesis work on an aspect of phonology. Sometimes I wonder if this research and I are having a flickering affair, that one day I’ll look back on it and think about how I’ve long considered myself intellectually promiscuous and just flitted with the field before finding some new, exciting idea. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I know that I am keen to do simulations and computation, that I remember being an undergraduate watching a talk by Luc Steels and being forever changed because of it.

And I’ve thought a lot about who am I to be doing this line of research. Computational linguistics falls neatly in the category of STEM, and I am proud to call myself a Latina in this field. But I’ve also been a failure at times, a person in a hospital bed, and those ghosts jingle their chains at me when I sit down to study my textbooks on agent-based modeling. I am haunted by who I have been but intoxicated by who I wish to become. That is what education is all about, is it not? I’ve never quite considered what it would mean to give myself permission to do this, to be the friend of big tonogenesis. I am probably an imposter, but I am also the kind of person who gets back up until she cannot be called anything less than hopeful and dedicated.

So that is, up front, an update on my graduate career thus far. I’m presently enrolled in three courses, but I think I will swap one out for a thesis credit. I’ve been pottering about in Overleaf to build my proposal for my thesis advisor. I’m working on a document that will have four chapters, and I’m doing it all around edits for the novel. Truthfully, I wish one could turn academic writing into something speculative, but that is not the point of science, I understand. Even still, I write, write, write, whittling away on chapter one of the thesis in parallel with the prologue of the novel. I will have a separate blog post on this, but suffice it to say that I have so much to do and so much enthusiasm to do it all.

This degree is the most difficult, busiest, and most divine of all of my studies. I do already have an MA, which was a challenge to rise to, but very different from this program that I am in presently. Perhaps it all comes back to the fact that I never thought I would be here doing a thesis on phonology. Writing was a familiar field, comfortable like a glove that slid on, leather and supple. Phonology has required me to revisit textbooks.

What is tonogenesis, you ask. Ah! Great question!

Let’s start from the beginning. A tonal language is one in which the pitch or timbre of an individual sound or cluster of sounds changes the word’s lexical or grammatical meaning. The most widely spoken tone language is Mandarin. Some languages feature contrasts of four tones — again, Mandarin — while the Athabaskan languages that are classified as tonal make two distinctions: High and low. Therefore, tonogenesis is the origins of tonal classification systems, how they came to evolve, how they fuse with the language’s features, and, even, how they disappear (tonoexodus). There are a myriad of theories that have been proposed as to tonogenesis comes about, but my interest is in modeling how usage has affected tonal polarity in one large tonal family. Thank you for coming to my elevator pitch.

I think we all know how this thesis is going to come together: Over vats of tea. I have two new infusers, one from my colleague, and one from my boss. They’ll be getting a lot of mileage in them throughout the drafting of this big tonogenesis work. I like to romanticize how it will all go down — nights spent at Frontier, clacking away at a computer. Maybe Anna and I can work together (talk about a great thesis idea!). Maybe I will get a few drafts in, will get to defend it, will get to graduate after all. This is over ten years in the making, a love of linguistics since I knew that there was a field dedicated to the thing I love the most: Language. From individual languages to linguistics to cognitive science to, oddly, phonology, I’ve come a long way.

So don’t mind me now. I’ve got some textbooks to read.