Perhaps a new topic of discussion

after reading oh, 100 e-mails with the word 'born' in the subject line, i
would like to ask a question on a different theme.

i'm currently working on a lang i call 'sdeete' at the moment, though that
may be subject to change. i'v decided to make it tonal, but i don't have
much experience at all with tonal languages. so, a few questions are in
order:

- when there are only 2 level tones (high/low) in the language, how far
apart are they, usually? a 3rd? 5th?

-sdeete has phonemic vowel length. would it be reasonable/naturalistic to
have only long vowels carry high tone? i find this concept intrinsically
pleasing for some absurd reason, but i don't know if there's any natlang
precedent for it.

-could someone suggest some readings to me about tone systems and tone
sandhi? especially something relating to north american aboriginal
languages.

i might have enough info to submit an outline of sdeete sometime soon
(encourage me!), but i found HNAI vol. 17 in the library a while ago, and
i'v been too engrossed in the Cree and Eastern Pomo sections to fiddle with
sdeete much. Speaking of Eastern Pomo, do any of yous know of a good grammar
of that language? it's concatenative verbal morphology is amazing!

tankje,

byron

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