Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

H. S. Teoh wrote:

>On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 01:51:24PM -0500, Nik Taylor wrote:
>[snip]
> > 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"
>
>Whoa, could you unpack that? I don't think you're talking about
>voiced/unvoiced initial consonants, are you? Because my L1 distinguishes
>between [b], [p], [p<h>] and yet it's tonal. How would that have happened?
First you lose the voicing distinction, giving rise to a tonal difference.
Then the voicing distinction comes back into the language, but tone isn't lost.

> > Simple syllable structure, for one.  In fact, that simplification would
> > probably be the origin of the tones.
>[snip]
>
>Hmm, interesting. It seems to me that using different tones help to
>distinguish between syllables that are otherwise identical, so if you
>start with, say, (totally hypothetical example) [bia] and [bi@] which mean
>two completely different things, if language change causes them to both
>collapse into [bi], then the development of tone could be one thing to
>help maintain the original distinction.
Bingo. Probably not with these exact examples, of course, but you have the
right idea.

Tone arises in the language accidentally based on the structure of the
syllable. It is comletely predictable. You lose the portions that caused
the tone to arise, but the tone is maintained. Since there is no more
evidence of what caused the tone, it is now a phonemic part of the phonology.

Zapotecan languages are usually described as tonal, but in some (many?) the
tones are not phonemic. For example, San Lucas Quivanese Zapotec has four
types of vowels (plain, glottalized, breathy, and "checked" IIRC). The
combination of these features gives rise to certain tonal contours. The
closely related language Tlacalula Zapotec has not to my knowledge, been
analyzed that way. The person I know who works on it treats tone as
phonemic. So whatever caused the tone to arise in the first place (probably
a system like in SLQZ) has disappeared, leaving only the tone behind as
evidence that it ever existed.

Marcus