52
J. MCCOY
2. The Data. After the work with the informants was finished, the material was analysed both in terms of its own structure and as compared with SC. This latter comparison was in fact a continuing operation throughout the entire collection procedure. Although SC has been treated any number of times by competent scholars, I still preferred to have the two pronunciations side by side at all times during the research rather than try to work out the similarities and differences on the basis of written descriptions or on the strength of my own transcriptions. The following material on KS should best be termed a phonological sketch because of its abbreviated form, but it is to be assumed that any untreated feature in KS is similar to the same feature in SC. Reference should be made to a good treatment of SC such as Chao (1947).
The KS tones and the symbols used for them are:
high falling 1
low falling 2
high rising 3
high level 4
mid level 5
low level 6
In a strict phonemic analysis there are only these six tones in KS. However, for practical purposes, particularly for comparative work on linguistic material, it is often convenient to chart the tones of a modern dialect in terms of their correspondences to the traditional tone categories. For KS these correspondences are as follows:
(The pairs of numbers in parentheses represent the approximate musical contour of each tone on a relative scale from 1 low to 5 high.)
Level Rising Going Entering high falling (53)low falling (31) high rising (45) high level (55)
mid level (33)
low falling (32) high level (55)
mid level (33)
low falling (32)
Phonemically, the three KS entering tones may be best analysed as high level, mid level, and low falling tones respectively in syllables with the stop finals /-t, -k/.