Phonemic Pitch in Maya

Mayan phonology

“…This is at best an oversimplification. It has long been known that the ‘rearticulated’ vowels are more often produced with weak laryngealization (creaky voice) than with a true glottal stop in Yucatecan languages (see comments to this effect in Pike , Blair , Blair and Vermont Salas , Fisher , Straight , Fox ). Frazier (2009a,b,2013) provides an extensive phonetic documentation of Yucatec vowels and tones which confirms these fieldworker descriptions using instrumental methods.…”

The phonetics of Yucatec Maya and the typology of laryngeal complexity

“…11 Finally, early linguists working with YM (e.g. Pike 1946, Blair & Vermont Salas 1965 describe the glottalized vowels as being of the form [v/v]. Thus, we do not know when creaky voice replaced a glottal stop as the canonical production, but it seems clear that this change did happen.…”

“…The first analyses of YM also recognized that the glottalized vowels were produced with initial high pitch (see Pike 1946).There are thus two things that had to happen in order for *[v/v] to develop into modern day [v ṽ]: a full glottal stop becomes more rarely produced, with creaky voice in its place, and the initial high pitch (which starts as an intrinsic correlate of the following glottal stop) is reinterpreted as tonal (i.e. pitch has been phonologized and then phonemicized in the sense of Hyman 1976).…”

Yucatec Maya Vowel Alternations — Harmony as Syntagmatic Identity

“…An ongoing discussion in the literature is whether Yucatec Maya has phonemic pitch accent or tones (see e. g. Pike 1946, Blair & Vermont-Salas 1967, Fisher 1976» Straight 1976, Lehmann 1990). Unfortunately, no work is done so far on the accentual system.…”