Redundant voicing and register in Mnong Râlâm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mnong Râlâm is a South Bahnaric language (Austroasiatic) that is traditionally described as preserving a voicing contrast in onset obstruents, contrary to other languages of the Mnong/Phnong continuum. Acoustic results yield evidence that this voicing distinction is less robust than previously suggested and is redundant with a register contrast realized on following vowels through modulations of F1 at vowel onset (and more limited variations of F2 and voice quality). A perception experiment also shows that F1 weighs heavier than closure voicing in identification. The existence of a language in which voicing and register are redundant allows us to revisit previous models of registrogenesis. It suggests that the acoustic properties of register may develop and become distinctive while voicing is still present rather than as a direct consequence of devoicing. The unexpected discovery of register in Mnong Râlâm also challenges previous reconstructions of Proto-South-Bahnaric, in which only voicing is postulated, based on hitherto limited available descriptive materials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".