Re: Phonation or Register Tones (was: Trial of the century?)

On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Kristian Jensen wrote:

> John Fisher wrote:
> >
> >Great!  A conlang with tones!  Off-hand, I can't think of any other
> >that has been mentioned here...  Unless I'm wrong?
> >
> Boreanesian does not have tones per se, at least not in the sense of
> tones found in most languages where varying pitches play a phonemic
> role. In Boreanesian, it is *not* the movement of the glottis that
> is phonemic, rather it is the degree of constriction in the glottis
> that is phonemic. Some call this register tones, but I prefer to use
> the term phonations because I don't feel the word 'tone' is really
> applicable.
This sounds cool, interesting, and (to me) naturalistic!  Why can't
Esperanto be like this?

Vilani, a collaborative conlang for the Traveller RPG setting, which I've
recently given up on, is (was? will be?) tonal.  According to the
originally-published blurb about it I was working from, it has six
distinctive tones, any of which can occur on any syllable (Vilani words
tending to be polysyllabic, too). I eventually reworked this to describe
the situation as each word having any one of six tone _patterns_ (i.e.,
which syllable the upstep/downstep occurs on), thinking this might make it
more appealing/accessible to fans trying to learn it.  Unfortunately,
interest in the entire project just doesn't seem to warrant my writing the
promised _Teach Yourself Vilani_.

> It appears that tonal conlangs are common enough. But I dare say
> that there are not many conlangs with contrastive phonations. Some
> languages contrast creaky voice, modal voice, and breathy voice at
> the syllable level. I have heard that many Austro-Asiatic languages
> do this as well as a few Amerind languages. In any case, it is quite
> rare the world over. Could this account for why this might be rare
Ah-ha!  Not so fast!  It just so happens that my other conlang, Sayat, has
a _sort_ of distinctive phonation feature.  As a member of the
little-known Pseudo-Tungusic language family (a branch of that greater
conlang, Altaic), Sayat has "vowel harmony", which is fundamentally based
on tongue root retraction/advancement.  The actual phonetic effect of this
is most clearly heard as pharyngialization.  In Sayat, word stems are
marked as either "hard" or "soft" ("hard" being pharyngialized), and all
affixes change their vowel quality to match.

I have no idea how to represent this in ASCII IPA, so I'll skip examples.
It's essentially like those examples of Turkish vowel harmony we've all
read about in introductory linguistics books -- just that the distinctive
feature is really tongue root/pharyngialization, not height/frontness.

> Anyone else dare challenge the uniqueness of Boreanesian? 8-)
Wouldn't dream of it :)  How does this work across syllable boundaries --
is there any tone sandhi ('phonation sandhi'?) ?

Kenji Schwarz