Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

Hey, welcome to the list!  Ever heard of Tocharian?  That's an IE
language, actually two, that were spoken somewhere in China.

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.

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).

DaW.

On Sun, 3 Dec 2000 12:29:08 -0500 E-Ching Ng <e-ching.ng@...>
writes:
> Hi, I'm new to the list.  I can't figure out how to search the
> conlang archives without searching all the other archives at the
> same
> time, so apologies in advance if this is something the list has
> discussed before.  I'm inventing a new Indo-European subfamily for
> a
> class project, and I'm going to have them migrate to China and
> become
> a latter-day minority group.  At some point I'll sketch out some of
> their
> syntax so I can write a tiny text in the language, but phonology
> and
> some morphology are what I really have to nail down for this
> project.