Re: Grammatical tones

 --- Christopher Wright <faceloran@...> wrote: >
Bama.
>
> How plausible is it for tones to have a grammatical
> rather than lexical
> meaning? For instance, where many languages have
> articles, this one would
> have different tones instead. Or perhaps verb number
> or tense would be
> indicated thus.
>
> That says it all, doesn't it?*
>
> *Well, not _all_. The minimum amount of time to say
> everything would be
> at least as long as it takes to happen, which is
> generally agreed to be a
> minimum of one hundred thousand billion years.
archaic bac uses tones to indicate tense :

|sot Bac| I say
|sot Bàc| > |sot Bawc| I said ( low tone )
|sot Bác| > |sot Bayc| I will say ( high tone )

it also uses tones to indicate interrogatives and
contrary-to-expectation statements :

|wer Ga?pos| > |wer Gaposi| do you think so ? ( rising
tone )
|sot Ga!pos| > |sot Gaposu| I do think so ( falling
tone )

As you can see, I've ditched them in the current
version of the language, as i wasn't too good at
pronouncing them and bac words are already incredibly
compact :

|sot Rhwanykh wher| /sOt r\aI~x WE4/ I might in future
start falling in love with you
where |Rhwanykh| is the topic depleted future
continuous inceptive subjunctive of |Rak| 'to love'
( topic depleted indicates that where |Rak| would
usually take two topics : |sot wer Rak| 'You and I
love each other', here it only takes one, but keeps
the original meaning |sot Rakh wher| 'I love you but
you don't necessarily love me' )

I find the /aI/ diphthong more distinctive than high
tone

bn


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com