The reality of Hausa "Low tone raising": A response to

Paul Newman and Philip Jaggar in an article in this issue of Studies in African Linguistics argue that a rule of Low Tone Raising (LTR), proposed in Leben [1971] is not a synchronic rule in Hausa. This rule, as originally formulated in Leben [1971], raises a [mallow tone (L) of a word if the syllable bearing the L (1) follows a L and (2) has a long vowel. Newman & Jaggar's method of argumentation is, first, to show eight types of phonetic violations of LTR (§§1.1-8). Next (§§2.1-4), they show that four puta-tive cases of LTR as a productive synchronic rule are problematic and/or have other, better explanations. They conclude that LTR is not "a synchronically vi-able rule on the same level as other regular rules in the language, such as the shortening of long vowels in closed syllables or the simplification of LH on a single syllable to H " (p. 229). While Newman & Jaggar argue only that LTR is not a "synchronically viable rule", the force of their paper, with its listing of many "counterexamples " to LTR, is to suggest that LTR has no reality at all in modem Hausa. I agree with them that LTR is not a rule; indeed, contrary t