Re: Random Questions #1: Tone Languages

En réponse à Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...>:

>
> So: is this tone, pitch accent, or what?  And into what categories of
> betonedness do natlangs fall?  (IIRC, Christophe referred to 'contour
> tone'
> and 'register tone' ... what are these?  Are there others?)
>
Well, pitch accent is a little complicated, so I'll explain it at the end. But
note already that Japanese has pitch accent, and can have changes of pitch in
the middle of a long vowel. This is because its pitch accent (as well as
everything else in this language) is not based on syllables but on morae (which
have a near one-to-one correspondance with the written kana - except for
complex syllables like kya which are one mora but two kana -) and a long vowel
makes for two morae. It looks like your Telona (with its "long vowels that
sometimes make for two syllables") could well have a moraic system rather than
syllabic.

But let's see the definitions. First, we have the purely tonic languages. Those
are of two kinds:

- "register tone languages", which refers to languages preferring polysyllabic
words with one tone per syllable. Those tones are usually simple, based on
usually two levels (high and low), and are usually flat (so we have syllables
with high tones and syllables with low tones). Exceptionally they can have non-
flat one-directional tones (rising or falling), but never more complicated. A
typical word in such a language would be tembang|ali (with a click to look
nice :)) ) with tone pattern HLHL (or HHHH, or LLLL, or HLLH, or whatever you
want). Register tone languages are common in Africa (Hausa is one).
- "contour tone languages", which refers to languages preferring monosyllabic
words with one tone per syllable, but those tones can be quite complex. They
are usually based on quite a few levels (maximum known five), and their tones
can be flat (high, medium, low, etc...), one directional (high->medium, low-
>highmid, lowmid->medium, etc...) or even more complex (tone 3 in Mandarin is
IIRC medium->low->medium, and I saw once a Teach Yourself of a language I don't
remember where a tone was described as medium->lowmid|highmid->lowmid!! Yes, a
tone with a jump in the middle!!!). They often mix other features in their
tones, like creaky voice, etc... Those languages are quite frequent in Asia.

Pitch accent is something simpler, quite comparable to stress accent. Pitch
accent languages have, like stress accent languages, one stress per word
(whatever its length). This stress doesn't mark a syllable which is pronounced
louder, but a change of pitch. Those languages have always only two levels of
pitch, low and high, only one syllable can take high pitch in a word (like in
stress languages only one syllable can take the stress, secondary stressed
syllables are always phonetically conditioned), though there are sometimes
rules (like in Japanese) that the high pitch of a syllable can propagate to all
the following syllables of the word, and only one downstep and one upstep can
occur in a word. But I guess my explanation is probably a little confusing, so
let's take an example I know: Japanese :)) .
In Japanese, the so-called accent marks a downstep (i.e. a change from high
pitch to low pitch). This downstep can have four positions at most:
- after the first syllable, in which case the pitch pattern of the word is
always HL(L...),
- after the second syllable of the word, in which case the pitch pattern has to
be LHL(L...) (remember that only one syllable can have high pitch),
- at the end of the word, in which case the pitch pattern is LHH(H...)
(remember about that rule that says that the high pitch can propagate?) with
enclitics following the word having low tone,
- after the end of the word (!!), in which case the pitch pattern is identical
to the previous case, but the enclitics also take high pitch!
Note that you cannot have a tone pattern HLH (when the second syllable is low,
all following syllables must be low, because of the rule of propagation of
pitch). Pitch accent is basically at the limit between tone systems and stress
accent.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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