Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

Danny Wier wrote:

>Hey, welcome to the list!  Ever heard of Tocharian?  That's an IE
>language, actually two, that were spoken somewhere in China.
Thanks for the welcome, Danny. I know of the existence of Tocharian, but no specifics
until the professor unveils its wonders in class next week.

>Some IE languages that developed tonality: Panjabi (voiceless-voiced
>distinction of stops merged into voiceless, but replaced by high-low
>tone), Serbo-Croatian, Swedish.  Lithuanian and Classical Greek preserved
>the prosodic tones of PIE; the former lost the complex tone so it's just
>rising and falling tone.
There is a small but annoying distinction between tonal and pitch-accent languages,
I believe. Tonal languages have a certain compulsory tone for every morpheme
(okay, I can think of a few exceptions in Mandarin and Hokkien which are said
to have no tone, but they're rare and in unstressed positions). Pitch-accent
languages use tone the way other languages use stress - it gets distributed by
word or sentence. Swedish, Lithuanian and classical Greek are definitely
pitch-accent, and I suspect Serbo-Croatian is too. Punjabi just might be tonal.
It's almost close enough to the Himalayas for that to have caught on, but
that's still a little far off.

I have been gnawing on the question of whether Singlish (Singaporean English) is
pitch-accent or tonal. In the basolect (really informal Singlish,
unintelligible to the uninitiated) some words definitely have invariant tone -
ironically I think that gets lost as you move into the acrolect (educated
English that still retains regional features). Opinion from H S Teoh? Manglish
(Malaysian English) works differently, I'm sure, but the differences might
throw light on this question.

>I'm curious as to how Sino-Tibetan tones developed from Sino-Caucasian,
>since North Caucasian languages are usually non-tonal (but much more
>complex in consonant phonologies).
I am in the dark about Sino-Caucasian ... what are the Caucasian languages, and
how certain is it that they're related to Sino-Tibetan?

E-Ching