Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Typically, the loss of a voicing contrast in initial consonants results
>in a phonemic high/low tone distinction, with earlier voiced initial
>voiced syllables developing low tone ... while the depletion of the
>inventory of the inventory of possible syllable-final consonants results
>in a distinction between open syllables and those ending in a glottal
>stop or constriction, with the latter eventually giving rise to rising
>or falling tones"
That points me towards getting contours for my language, which is terribly helpful.
This is "The World's Major Languages" edited by Bernard Comrie, right? Thanks
Nik!

>>I'm inventing a new Indo-European subfamily for a class project
>
>For a class project?  Awesome!  What's the project?
[chuckle] Well - the project is to invent a new Indo-European subfamily. :p The class is
Intro to Indo-European linguistics. Every week we do another subfamily (last
week was Armenian, next week is Tocharian) and another quick topic in
historical linguistics (e.g. semantic change, analogical change) or the
structure of Indo-European (like de Saussure and his laryngeals). I was
thinking of projecting English 500 years into the future as my project, and the
prof was fine with that, but it would have had embarrassingly little to do with
Indo-European linguistics.

> > If there are other areal phonological features that anyone thinks
> > might be worth including
>
>Simple syllable structure, for one.  In fact, that simplification would
>probably be the origin of the tones.
Yes, I was planning on having monosyllabic morphemes. Am not quite sure how I'm
going to deal with cases. Hmong is supposed to have myriad classifiers that
disambiguate number and gender - I might do something like that for the
educational value to myself, though I have a feeling that in real life the
language would pick up the rigid syntax and optional particles that are common
to both Mandarin and Hokkien Chinese, and which I therefore assume to be common
to the Sino-Tibetan family within China. I still have no idea what happens to
the other minority languages in China ... Hmong is Southeast Asian.

E-Ching