Re: When are Pitch-accents and Tonemes too bothersome?

Dear Conlangers,

Vilani apparently has "six tones".  I have stretched this
a bit to mean that Vilani has "six pitch-accent patterns
used to inflect parts of speech".  (How's that for a stretch?)

But I'm innovating, which means I'm probably being over-
zealous.  Hence a request for a sanity check.

Anyway, My six patterns are HL+, LHL+, HHL+, LHHL+, LLHL+,
and L+.  Patterns are applied to verbs thus:

HL   : plain old present/past tense  "he spoke"
LHL  : unknown use                   ?
HHL  : decreasing/perfect            "he stopped speaking"
LHHL : increasing/imperfect          "he started speaking"
LLHL : cooperative                   "he spoke together with -"
L    : reflexive                     "he spoke to himself"

Patterns are applied to nouns thus:

HL   : ergative case                 "he spoke"
LHL  : absolutive                    "he _is human_"
HHL  : vocative?                     "O man!"
LHHL : possessive (genitive)         "of the human"
LLHL : dative/benefactive            "to/for/at... the human"
L    : ablative?                     "done by him"


Words with less than three syllables will be ambiguous.


Rob