Re: tonal languages?

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 17:24:48 -0500, Etak <tarnagona@...> wrote:

>Hello
>   I'm something of a newbie conlanger and I was
>wondering if someone could please answer a couple of
>questions.  Could someone please tell me how tonal
>languages work.  I'm working on my first conlang and
>making it a tonal language sounds kind of cool.  I was
>thinking that, assuming I understand correctly, the
>speakers of this language would be able to make
>sentences with many shades of meaning by changing the
>tones of certain words so that the grammar implies one
>word and the way the word was actually spoken implies
>another.  Do you think such a system would work, or
>just become confusing?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "grammar" in this context, since the
way the word is spoken would be part of the grammar, but it's certainly
possible to have a tone change that adds meaning to a sentence. English
even does this to a certain degree. But the thing that distinguishes tonal
languages from other kinds of languages is that a difference in tone can
distinguish between two different items of the vocabulary, in the same way
that a difference in a consonant or vowel can. For instance, "wen" in
Mandarin Chinese can mean "language" if spoken with a rising tone, and
"ask" if spoken with a falling tone. These are considered as two separate
words (written as "wén" and "wèn" in the Pinyin spelling used in
dictionaries), not the same word spoken with different intonations.

Now if you have a language that includes tone as part of the regular system
of sounds that make up words (what we technically refer to as a "phoneme
inventory"), it would be possible to have a morpheme (a minimal unit of
meaning) that is expressed entirely by changes in tone. That's a pretty
unusual situation even in tonal languages, but I seem to recall that there
was an example of this in Thomas Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_ (an
indispensable source of inspiration, but my copy of it seems to have
mysteriously vanished).

>   Also, does anyone know a way that I can teach
>myself to speak my conlang?  I don't actually know any
>tonal languages so I need to teach myself how to
>recognize and speak the different sounds, but I'm not
>sure how to do this.  Does anyone have any
>suggestions?
>---Etak
I've never had much trouble with tones, so I don't know what to suggest,
but you might try getting a cassette course for a tonal language (e.g.
Routledge's "Colloquial Cantonese") and listening carefully to the example
words. Actually, Cantonese would probably be one of the harder ones to
start with, since it has so many tones that sound almost alike; a language
with fewer tones (like Thai) might be better. Swedish or Norwegian might be
good ones to start with, since they're Germanic languages, related to
English, and have only two tones.

Some examples of tones in Thai, Chinese, and Cantonese:

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter10/thai/thai.html

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/course/chapter10/chinese/chinese.html

http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/vowels/chapter2/cantonese/recording2.2.html

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