Re: tonal languages?

--- 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.
Can't be of much help there; I think tones work
like other sounds in a language. So in one
language, you might have sarz (kiss) and sar
(kick) where there's no mistaking them on account
of the different final sounds. On the other hand,
you might have a related language where zar1
[high tone] is kiss and zar3 [low tone] is kick.
The numbers indicate tone, and it would seem that
the RZ is lost with an accompanying rise in tone.
Speakers of this second language understand the
various tones the way we might distinguish B, P,
W, WR and HW.

> I'm working on my first conlang and
> making it a tonal language sounds kind of cool.
An admirable goal for a first language!

>  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.
I don't see why it couldn't work like this. We
already do this English, using homophones and
near homophones; only we don't have the tones to
make the distinctions.

> Do you think such a system would
> work, or just become confusing?
Unless you're inventing an orcslang, you'll want
your conlang to be as wandlesomely
confundibulating, and as tripletrine maggelatious
as you can possibly make it!

>    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?
That's a good question! Don't have an answer for
that one!

Padraic.



=====
la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ast meiyoer ke 'l andrext ben trasfu.


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