К вопросу фонетических параллелей в алтайских языках

Abstract

There are few works devoted to this question in Altaic studies. Till 1950’s this field had experimental data on motion of tone in some Tatar words only found out by V.A. Bogoroditsky and his postgraduate student. In 1950’s the experimental research of stress and intonation in Turkic, Buryat, Tungusic-Manchurian languages including Evenki was fulfilled. The author of the article fulfilled experimental research of word stress and intonation of the interrogative sentence of Evenki language in the end of the 20th century on the materials of Evenki language of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). On the basis of acoustic observations a stress is usually subdivided into power and tonic ones. In Evenki language, according to G. M. Vasilevich, the quality of stress is a power one (which is equal to expiratory one); in Evenki language of Yakutia according to the data of experiment fulfilled by the author of this article, the stress is tonic. The intonation has always been recognized as the most important sign of sounding oral speech, as means of any word style or composition of words in a sentence (utterance), as means of clearing up its communicative meaning and emotional-expressive shades. Intonation is a complex phenomenon, it consists of some components and is described with the help of four acoustic parameters: frequency of basic tone, spectrum, intensity and length. The most important and the most unique components of intonation are stress and melodies. Intensity, force of sound is a basis of stress. At the same time, stress can be expressed acoustically in various ways: through acoustic parameter only (through intensity of, or length of, or through turning up/ down, basic tone frequency), or through different combinations of these parameters. Baichura U. S. in his article “Instrumental’nie dannie ob udarenii i intonatsii v altaiskih iazikah” [“Instrumental data on stress and intonation in Altaic languages”] (1971: 279-292) states that the stress and intonation in Altaic languages are not uniform, but there are some common moments uniting these languages. He writes that when passing from eastern or southern Altaic languages or dialects to those located in North or West, the tonic accent, and stress in general, has a tendency for shifting from the last syllable to the beginning of the word, that can be the result of substance’s action or the consequence of saving initial stress at the first syllable that we presuppose for agglutinative languages that have vocalic harmony, — for example, A. von Gaben presupposed it for Turkic languages. Our research proves this statement of U. S. Baichura. In some Altaic languages, including in Turkic and Tungusic-Manchurian, the tonic stress and the power stress can coincide in one syllable of a word, but these stresses can not coincide in other Altaic languages (in particular, in the above mentioned groups). The relative independence of stress components (i.e. means of underlining of one or another syllable in a word) from each other is proved with our instrumental data on Altaic languages and with our data on the material of Evenki language. In Altaic languages, as well as in Evenki of Yakutia, the length is not directly connected with stress, including with power stress and with turning up relative pitch of tone. In distinction from the Russian language, the length in Altaic ones can not act as a component of stress: some stretch of stressed vowel can be met in Altaic languages, but under condition of equal phonetic position, i.e. if identical conditions are available. The stress and intonation in Altaic languages can have phonological function. Generally, the phonetic position can influence on stress and its components that is determined on the basis of the material of many Ural-Altaic languages.