Re: tonal languages?
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, December 15, 2003, 2:21 |
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On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:50:20 -0500, John Cowan <cowan@...>
wrote:
> Herman Miller scripsit:
>
>> 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.
>
> In the Taishan dialect of Cantonese, spoken in Chinatowns worldwide,
> pronouns are pluralized by changing the tone.
I can't find the bit I was looking for, but _Describing Morphosyntax_ (p30)
says:
Some languages, especially in Africa and Meso-America, use tone
modification to signal very common morphological operations like tense and
aspect.
The book subsequently goes on, in some detail -- as does _Language
Universals And Linguistic Typology_ -- with examples of the way this works
in various languages and situations. If I had myself better prepared, I'd
produce those examples. If anyone's interested, I'll see if I can dig them
out tomorrow evening.
Paul
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