Sound Symbolism in Jinghpaw (Kachin)

Author(s): David Bradley and Edmund Leach

Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec., 1978), pp. 659-663
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2801257
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CORRESPONDENCE
Sound symbolism in Jinghpaw
(Kachin)
SIR,

I am sorry that Professor Leach does not

appreciate my comments on his attempts to
find sound symbolism in Jinghpaw (Kachin)
(Man (N.S.) 12, 336). I re-emphasise the value

of much of Leach's work to all of us, including

myself. However I doubt that any linguist
would suggest that Leach should look to the
early efforts of a missionary, such as Hanson
(I9I3), to elucidate the kinship system. Thus
it seems strange that he prefers to disregard
the work of highly competent linguists, such
as Matisoff and Maran-the second of whom
is also a native speaker of the language.
However, Leach refers us to Hanson (I9I7)
and his own speculations based on Hanson
(I906).

I do not think I have misrepresented the

argument in the paper cited (Leach I967):
that certain specific forms, including kinship
terms, are connected in meaning; and are not
only identical in sound (i.e. homophones) but
in fact are the same word (Leach I967: I38,
I43, I47). Leach (I977) retracts the suggestion
of identity, and suggests instead a degree of
similarity between different words that admits of punning. A parallel with English may
be drawn: when we pun, the words are
crucially of different meaning; though they

may be true homophones, they are more

often somewhat different.

In what follows, I will take up the points

raised by Leach (I977) in order.

In fact, as I stated, there are four tones in
standardJinghpaw. This happens to be exactly
the number that occurs in Putonghua
('Mandarin' Chinese) which Leach cites as an
example of a more fully tonal language.
There are, of course, languages with more or
fewer than four tones: Shan has more, Maru
fewer. These tones are just as necessary to
distinguish words as the segments-consonants
and vowels. For example, in Jinghpaw na
with low tone means, among other things,
'hear'; with mid tone, 'poisonous or intoxicating'; with high tone, 'irrigated field';

and with ?-prefix and falling tone, 'elder

sister'.
To save space, I abbreviated the statement

of the Jinghpaw tonal system. To repeat and

amplify: in non-stop final syllables there are
four tones: mid, low, and high level (Hanson
I9I7: 4 numbers these tones I, 2 and 3

respectively) and the falling tone, which

occurs in native words mainly with certain
core kinship terms. Most such kinship terms
have a glottal stop prefix; that is, the initial
consonant is preglottalised. Hanson does not

include the falling tone or the glottalisation,

as it is marginal apart from its use to mark
address forms of the kinship terms concerned.
In stop final syllables (with p, t, k or ?) only
the low and high tones occur (Hanson I9I7: 4

numbers these separately as tones 4 and 5,

since he considers the final glottal stop as part
of the tone). Thus, with the addition of the
final glottal stop segment there are four tones
in Maran's or Matisoff s analysis.
Table of tones
phonetic Hanson Matisoff, orthoMaran graphy
non-stop final
mid level I unmarked unmarked
low level 2 grave accent unmarked
high level 3 acute accent unmarked
high falling (absent) circumflex unmarked
accent
stop final
low 4 grave accent shows -p,
-t, -k

high 5 acute accent but not -?

As the table above shows, the standard
Jinghpaw orthography does not indicate the
tones or the glottal stop, whether initial,
prefixed, or final. Speakers have commented
to me that the orthography was in this way
inadequate, like the old Shan orthography,
but unlike the new Shan orthography,
Burmese, and some other orthographies used
in the region.
One reason for this lack is that there are
major dialect differences within Jinghpaw,
with differences in the realisation of certain
tones, the sandhi or juncture processes which
affect the tones in polysyllabic words, or the
distribution of certain tones with certain

initial consonants. For ease of printing, to

avoid these complications, and to achieve a
pandialectal orthography the missionaries left
the tones and glottal stop out. Hanson
however emphasises that they are in fact

contrastive (I9I7: 4). He suggests that of 7,000

words, about 200 occur with all five of his
tones (i,ooo words total); over I,000 occur
with two or three of his tones (say 2,500
words); and the balance (roughly half) occur
with one tone only. This suggests that some
tones are less frequent than others; but not

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66o

CORRESPONDENCE

that they are uncontrasted. Just as there are

some possible syllables in English which
happen not to be words, e.g. /pib/, any
language with a complex phonology will
have some fortuitous gaps. The more com-

plex the phonology, the more gaps in the

syllable canon are likely.
The demonstrative examples Leach gives

are an example of a possible universal of

sound symbolism: higher pitch and greater
distance. Similar examples are widespread;

ear' na na *s-naA
'night' na shana? *s-nya(k)
'hear' na na *naA

'illness' ana ? ina *?;t-C-naA

'taboo time' na na?
'long time' na nA?

'black' na nak/na? *C-nak

These forms have very little in common.

Some, such as 'hear' and 'ear', can be
legitimately connected; similarly, 'black' and
'taboo time', and 'night' and 'long time' may

for example, in many languages words for

fit together in word families. The kinship
smallness or nearness contain i sounds; and
term 'elder sister' stands out, from its tone
words for largeness or distance contain a
possibility and its prefix. As in any language,
sounds. Ultan (I970) finds such symbolism in
some words do not have clear etymologies.
roughly half of the languages that he surveys;
The connexion between 'hear' and 'ear' is
Sapir (I929) gives the results of -psychoa derivational one: comparative evidence
linguistic tests that show the reality of this
suggests that the noun was produced by
symbolism for speakers of English. All such
prefixing an *s to the verb at an earlier stage of
phonaesthetic factors, unless they are part of
the language. The prefix affected the developthe word formation process of the language,
ment of the tone inJinghpaw, and can still be
will have exceptions. Thus in English, 'near'
found in other Tibeto-Burman languages;
and 'far', 'this' and 'that', and 'little' and
but not directly in Jinghpaw. Sets of
'large' conform to the pattern, but not 'big'
morphologically-derived and semanticallyand 'small'. Short of extensive psycholinguis- related words of this kind are called word
tic testing, it would be difficult to prove the families.
kind of phonaesthetics that Leach attributes to
A similar derivational process is seen in the
Jinghpaw. Of course, most of his examples
first example cited by Leach (I967: 34). In this
have both phonological and historical probcase, verbs are derived from nouns.
lems which make such tests unnecessary.
I had thought that address and reference
gloss ortho- phonology etymology
usage of kinship terms would be clear in
graphy
anthropological uses: the address form is used'grandchild' shu shfi *su
'take care of' shu shu
when talking to the person, and the reference
'frog' shu sha? (*s-balB)
form is used when talking about someone. In
'grandmother' woi ?woi *piyA
fact the kawa /k;D?wA/ form cited by Leach
'take care of' woi woi
(I977: 338) contains the third singular pro'monkey' woi woi *b-woy
noun prefix and the meaning is 'his
(someone's) father', not just 'father'. The
As Leach says, the connexion between the
address form would occur in the sentence
kinship term and the verb is clear; the
Leach cites: /?wa/. In reference use, there is a
difference in form is due to the different
prefix to indicate whose relative one is talking phonological and morphological markings of
about.

the kinship terms. Comparative evidence

With regard to the examples that I cited, I shows that the similarity between 'monkey'
simply picked an early example (Leach
and the other two words is secondary. The
I967: I37-I39) and a late example (Leach
reconstructed word for 'frog' does not have a
I967: 144-I45) for detailed discussion. In fact
Jinghpaw cognate, but the actual form is
the former example is also involved with the
separate from the 'grandchild' word family.
arguments in Leach I964, trying to show the
In Jinghpaw the derivational affixesconnexion between pigs /wa?/ and men /wa/.
mostly prefixes-are often still present; for
Both exampYes can be well documented with
example the ma-prefix in mayu 'wife-givers'
comparative linguistic evidence. Diachroniwhich is a completely separate word from the
cally and synchronically, each word is difBurmese loan myu 'kind'. In many other
ferent and unconnected apart from partial
Tibeto-Burman languages these affixes have
similarity in sound.
affected other parts of the word, but are no
Again on the subject of na, let us consider
longer present-as in the 'hear' and 'ear'
the items Leach groups within the same word
example cited above in Jinghpaw. The eluci(Leach I967: 144; 1977: 338).
dation of such word families requires wide
comparison of related languages. Benedict
(1942) considers the kinship system, the
gloss ortho- phonology etymology
kinship terms, and their wider ramifications;
graphy
Matisoff (in press) deals with body parts and
'elder sister' na ?naI?na *?a-snamA

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CORRESPONDENCE
their relations with other areas of vocabulary
in a ground-breaking study. Much still remains to be done in Tibeto-Burman studies,
but comparison should follow description
and precede speculation.
The last example discussed in Leach (I967)
concerns water and putatively related words.
In Jinghpaw, the following words for water
and other liquids occur: ntsin 'water' (for
drinking); hpang 'liquor or water for spirits'
(poetic, archaic); ayam 'stagnant water'; and

those Leach considers: nam 'liquid' (in Shan

loanwords); hka 'moving body of water
(river, lake, spring)'; and hpung (Leach I967:
I49) which is an alternant of hpang, but which
never occurs alone; it must have some suffix
following. Thus in fact neither nam nor hka
simply means 'water'. All of these are to be
found in Hanson (I906), which is an excellent
dictionary apart from the absence of tone and
glottal stop markings.

66I

ascertaining earlier locations. One documented example is English: Old English had
longstanding intimate contact with other
Germanic languages such as pre-Danish and
pre-Norwegian; Middle English had
inferior-dominant contact with Old French;
later, there was learned contact with Latin
and Greek. In less well-known cases nearly as
much can be deduced. In general, too exact,
isolated similarities across genetic linguistic
boundaries are attributed to contact; patterns
of parallel similarities, to genetic relationship.

and long-established philological tradition,

and using a carefully-controlled method of
reconstruction, available language data are
compared. Formulae representing a hypothesis about an earlier stage can be worked
out, for those which are found to be genetically related (historically descended from a

There are two caveats which must be

added. One concerns a fact highlighted in
Leach (I954): not all speakers of a language are
the descendants of people who spoke earlier
stages of that language. People may cease
speaking one language and speak another
instead-as in the case of those Jinghpaw
who 'become' Shan. A language may also be
very strongly influenced by contact between
its speakers and those of another language,
and the resulting bilingualism. The Tsaiwa
(Atsi), Lawngwaw (Maru) and Lashi provide
an example: though on comparative linguistic grounds their languages can be closely
grouped with Burmese, their integration into
the Kachin political and social systems and
intimate contact with the Jinghpaw cause
some linguistic convergence as well. The
second caveat concerns the possibility of some
effect of phonaesthetic factors on sound
change in specific instances. Samuels (I972)

proto-language). A surprisingly detailed pic-

provides some well-documented examples

The really basic disagreement between

Leach and myself concerns the value of
comparative linguistics as a tool for verifying
modern semantic connexions of the kind

Leach wishes to propose. Based on a rigorous

ture of proto-phonology, morphology, synfrom English, in a sound historical linguistic

tax, semantics, and lexicon can be built up. All
framework.
It would be very desirable to continue the
such reconstructions are only as useful as the
excellent work of Benedict, along the lines of
data they are based on-hence the need for
Matisoff (in press), in the reconstruction of
more complete descriptions of languages,
the pre-Jinghpaw Proto-Tibeto-Burman kinsuch as Maran's rewriting of Hanson's dicship system. Similar studies have proceeded
tionary. In some cases history has provided
far for Proto-Indo-European: recently,
external controls for reconstruction, such as
Benveniste and Friedrich have done much to
Latin to compare with Proto-Romance (reclarify the characteristics of the P-I-E kinship
constructed from French, Italian, Spanish,
system and how it fits into the earlier society.
Romanian and so on); in such cases the real
When this basic research has been done for
language and the proto-language tally very
Proto-Tibeto-Burman, speculation about the
well. The problem with Leach's claim that
wider implications of individual words may
proto-languages are imaginary is that he is
be very productive.
thus rejecting the history of all languages.
The fact is that synchronically Jinghpaw
The value of loanwords in historical
kinship terms stand out from other vocalinguistics is that they show who has been in
bulary in two ways. Phonologically, they
contact, for how long, and in what way. The
may show a falling tone which is otherwise
effects on a language may be more or less
uncommon. Morphologically, they may
great: all loans may be fitted into the existing
show a glottal stop prefix. The other words
phonological systems, or they may add new
items and subsystems to existing ones. It is also connected with them in Leach I964, I967 and
I977 do not share these possibilities, and the
useful to observe which items and concepts
kinship terms are thus linguistically distinct,
were borrowed; in this way the development
and separate from other Jinghpaw
and spread of various activities can be traced.
vocabulary.
In some cases, even migration patterns are
clarified by borrowings; though genetic linDavid Bradley
Australian National University
guistic evidence is probably more useful in

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662

CORRESPONDENCE
NOTE

I am sorry that these comments have been

delayed by fieldwork in Thailand, Burma,
and India; including some work on Tsaiwa
(Atsi) and Lawngwaw (Maru). I would of
course not claim to be a fluent speaker of

Jinghpaw (Leach I964: 55) but no good

speaker can dispense with the tones. It is
ethnocentric to presume to ignore them.
Leach only manages to demonstrate that he is
no linguist.

Benedict, P. K. I942. Kinship in southeastern

Asia. Thesis, Harvard Univ.
I972. Sino-Tibetan: a conspectus.
Cambridge: Univ. Press.

Benveniste, E. I969. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes 2V. Paris:

tditions de Minuit.
Friedrich, P. I966. Proto-Indo-European kinship. Ethnology 5, I-36.
Hanson, 0. I906. A dictionary of the Kachin

of breath and conjured images in the mind

which, in Joycean fashion, are for ever
melting into other words and images to
produce what I understand by the word
'thought'. But in Bradley's world it would
seem that words are hard surfaced objects in
the world out there, with impermeable skins
and carefully labelled contents (meanings)
like the bottles in a chemist's dispensary; and
woe betide anyone who suggests mixing up
the contents according to any formula which
is not written out on a doctor's prescription!
And so too with language. In my world the
distinction between the language and a dialect
is simply a matter of degree, both are
changing all the time both by 'evolution' and
by 'diffusion' and even by straight invention.
There are no hard edges. Polylingual speakers
of basically monosyllabic tonal languages find

it especially easy to recognise punning asso-

ciations across language boundaries. But in

Bradley's world languages are unique species
objects which evolve by segmentary unilineal
language. Rangoon.
I9I3. The Kachins. Rangoon.
descent, for all the world as if they conformed
I9I7. A handbook of the Kachin or
to the paradigm of the Nuer descent system as
Jinghpaw language. Rangoon.
formulated by Evans-Pritchard. The thesis
that one can construct meaningful protoLeach, E. R. I954. Political systems of highland
languages by tracing such descent systems
Burma. London: L.S.E.
backwards is of course very ancient; indeed
I964. Anthropological aspects of
several centuries ago it was used to delanguage: animal categories and verbal
monstrate that when Adam and Eve spoke
abuse. In New directions in the study of
with God they must have talked in protolanguage (ed.) E. H. Lenneberg.
Hebrew. But I do not find the argument any
Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
more convincing on that account.
I967. The language of Kachin kinIt would take up a whole issue of Man to
ship: reflections on a Tikopia model. In
unravel the ethnographic confusions which
Social organization (ed.) M. Freedman.
Bradley has managed to introduce in his latest
London: Cass.
contribution and I shall not attempt the task.
Maran, L. R. in press. Dictionary of modern
But may I draw your readers' attention to a
Jinghpaw.
list of facts:
Matisoff, J. A. I974. The tones of Jinghpaw
(i) Bradley has still offered no explanation
and Lolo-Burmese: common origin vs.
as to how it came about that in his first letter
independent development. Acta Ling.
he 'dishonestly' suppressed all reference to
Hafn. 15:2, I53-2I2.
Hanson (I9I7) or to the fact that Hanson
in press. Variational semantics in
himself, in his I906 gloss on the word jin,
Tibeto-Burman. Philadelphia: ISHI
directly refuted one of the examples by which
Press.
Bradley sought to refute Leach!
Samuels, M. L. I972. Linguistic evolution
(ii) Bradley has still not offered any account
Cambridge: Univ. Press.
of what constitutes his own linguistic comSapir, E. I929. A study in phonetic sympetence in Jinghpaw. His new letter, like his
bolismJ. exp. Psych. IZ: 225-39.
earlier one, suggests very strongly that his
Ultan, R. I970. Size-round symbolism.
knowledge
of the language is based entirely
Working Papers on Language Universals
3
on what can be learned from written texts and
SI-S3I. Stanford: Universals Project.
from the laboratory study of specially prepared tape recordings in which 'a native
SIR,
in the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the speaker' (probably of the Bhamo dialect)
Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities,
reads out a prepared text into a microphone. I
haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her can find no indication that Bradley has ever
rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!I
heard Jinghpaw spoken in a domestic situDavid Bradley and I clearly inhabit quite
ation. If I am incorrect about this, then
different worlds. In my world words are,
Bradley is in error for failing to reveal a quite
alternatively, evanescent patterns in the flowcrucial piece of information.

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CORRESPONDENCE 663
(iii) I am not, as Bradley appears to believe,
a complete ignoramus in matters relating to
philology and linguistics. It is true I have a
long-standing contempt for the devotees of
proto-languages, but there are many eminent

professional linguists who share my contempt. In point of fact, the very first seminar
in linguistics which I ever attended was one in
which Roman Jakobson, in inimitable style,

brilliantly demonstrated the complete disutility of etymology for any understanding of

what is being said!
(iv) It seems perfectly clear that Bradley is
quite determined not to understand what I
said in my I967 article and it is probably quite
useless to attempt to break down the barrier
of incomprehension but let me make one
more attempt. One way and another I have
written a good deal about Jinghpaw kinship
terminology; in everything that I have written I have taken it for granted that kinship
terms in any language are 'about' relationships. A kinship term is never descriptive
object in the world out there, like, say, the
word 'chair'. If a, language contains a term
which the dictionary glosses as meaning 'elder
sister', then we can be sure that somewhere
else in the dictionary there will be another
term or terms which should be glossed
younger sister', 'younger brother'. When, as
a speaker, I use the 'elder sister' term I am
referring to a relationship, not to an object
person. This is clear from the fact that -the
woman whom I address as 'elder sister' will be
addressed by others as 'mother', 'daughter',
'female cross-cousin' or whatever. What my
I967 paper sought to demonstrate (and,

Bradley notwithstanding, it does demonstrate!) is that kinship relationships in

Jinghpaw are perceived as metaphorical
transformations of other kinds of relationship. For example I agree that the word shu
meaning frog, when pronounced in isolation
for the purposes of lexicography, will carry a
different tone from the word shu meaning
grandmother, but in normal conversation

From my point of view the history of the

morphemes employed in such devices is
entirely irrelevant.

(v) The ethnographic confusions which

must result if we follow Bradley's procedure
of treating each dictionary gloss of a morpheme as a separate word which is free from
all Joycean-Freudian associations with other
'words' represented by the same or very
similar morphemes can be illustrated from
Bradley's own letter. He has listed a series of
na sounds and their different meanings. He
alleges, without any justification at all, that I
have said they are all 'the same word'. I have
never said anything of the sort. What I have
said is that the various na sounds are close
enough to evoke punning association, and
that some of them clearly do so. However in
Leach (I977) I do say that ana in the sense of
'holiday', which Bradley (I977) said I had
ignored, 'is simply an alternative gloss for ana
in the sense of "sickness" and "taboo"' which
had not ignored. Bradley now assures us that
of Ian
his etymological procedures prove that these
are not just alternative glosses of the same
morpheme but quite separate 'words'. Well, I
wonder! In the anglicised ethnographic
literature of Assam the word genna is regularly used where we should now use the
adopted Polynesian word 'taboo'. Genna in
the Angami Naga language is usually written
kenna; in the language of the Mara (Lakher) it
appears as ana. Parry (I932, pp. 355-3 57) goes
to great lengths to unravel the sociological
complexity of the ana concept and, considering that he had never read Radcliffe-Brown's
seminal lecture on 'Taboo', he makes quite a
good job of it. But anyone who studies this
text with care and considers its implications
and then still continues to imagine that the na
sounds in these languages which carry the
connotation of 'taboo time' and the na sounds
which carry the connotation of 'illness' are
quite separate words with no mixture of meaning at the edges has just not begun to understand what social anthropology is all about.
Bradley should really stick to his last and
not try to lecture me as if I were a first year
undergraduate in a field in which I am expert

Jinghpaw speakers do not speak with the

tonal exactitude of Maran La Raw's still
unpublished Jinghpaw Dictionary; indeed I
and he is not.
very much doubt whether any Kachins
Edmund Leach
anywhere have ever spoken quite like that
University of Cambridge
except perhaps when learning to 'speak
NOTE
correctly' in a mission school classroom. In
ordinary spoken Jinghpaw there is, whatever
1 JamesJoyce, Finnegans Wake (I946 edn).
London: Faber & Faber, p. I04.
Bradley and Maran La Raw may assert to the
contrary, a recognisable punning association
Parry, N. E. I932. The Lakhers. London:
between the kinship relationship and the
Macmillan.
animal relationship so that, as I said in the first
place, the utterance of either shu or woi evokes
The Omani xanith
its counterpart by association and implies:

grandchild: grandmother:: little

frog: wizened old monkey

SIR,

Unni Wikan's letter encouraged close rereading of her original article in Man (I977,

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