Re: Explaining tone to a non-linguist; pharyngeals; noun incorporation

Trebor Jung wrote:

>How do you explain tone to a non-linguist? I'm writing a course for one of
>my languages, and its vowels have high and low tone (and BTW
voicelessness).
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If I were explaining tone to a non-linguist, I’d illustrate it via analogy
to their native language (or mine).  For example, while English does not
use tone morphologically (grammatically), it does use it “supra-
segmentally” to convey various subjective attitudes, expectations and
assumptions on the part of the speaker which are to be applied to the
semantic context of the utterance.  Thus, you can first show examples of
how tone is used in English to convey such information, and then analogize
this to the idea of using tone to convey morphological information instead
(e.g., tense, aspect, case, etc.)  To illustrate what I’m talking about,
how about something like the following (NOTE:  As a native speaker of
English, I’m throwing together the following examples out of my head
without reference to a formal phonology textbook, so my use of five tones
may in fact not be correct for English):

A single English sentence can convey many subtle nuances of attitude,
expectations, and assumptions when applied to an actual spoken context,
depending on the various changes in one’s voice-pitch applied to the
words.  Let’s take the simple question “Where have you been?” as an
example.  English speakers utilize 5 different relative voice-pitches when
speaking which I will number 1 (low),  2 (mid-low), 3 (mid), 4(mid-high), 5
(high).  Applying these pitch contours to this sentence in different ways
gives the following results:

PITCH:      3    3    3  5 2
WORDS:    Where have you been?
CONTEXT:  neutral inquiry with no pre-conceived attitude or assumptions

PITCH:      2   4 2   2  3 2
WORDS:    Where HAVE you BEEN?
CONTEXT:  conveys annoyance/anger/frustration due to concern over
addressee’s absence

PITCH:      2    3    4  1 2
WORDS:    Where have you been?
CONTEXT:  implied threat:  addressee was expected to be there earlier and
will now face negative consequences or punishment

Additional pitch contours can be illustrated via a hypothetical response
from the addressee to the questioner, consisting of the rhetorical
question “Where have I been?”

PITCH:      4    3   2  5 2
WORDS:    Where have I been?
CONTEXT:  rhetorical response conveying surprise at having been asked the
original question

PITCH:      3    3   2 4 5
WORDS:    Where have I been?
CONTEXT:  conveys annoyance at being asked the original question; implies
that original questioner should either know the answer already or that
asking about my whereabouts is irrelevant or beside the point.

Other pitch contours are seen in the following examples:

PITCH:    3 4 2      3 4 2      3 4 2
WORDS:    Well!  OR  Aha!   OR  So!
CONTEXT:  exclamation of ironic surprise upon discovering something hidden
or someone doing something illicit, giving the discoverer a moral or social
advantage over the person discovered

PITCH:    3 2 4
WORDS:    Well?
CONTEXT:  indicates disapproval and request for explanation

These examples show that individual words can be pronounced with a single
steady pitch, or with a dynamic pitch-contour consisting of two or three
different pitches.  Tone languages apply such patterns of pitch to
individual words, even syllables within a word, to convey morphological
information.  Such systematic patterns are called “tones” and vary from
language to language.

(At this point you could give examples from specific tone languages using
the numerical system above or a wavering line drawn parallel to the
sentence to show the specific tone patterns for the language and what they
represent morphologically).  You might also take a look at Sec. 1.3.2 of
the Phonology chapter in the Ithkuil grammar to see how I used graphic
representations to explain tone.

--John Quijada