Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

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?

> > And out of curiosity, do most of the minority languages in
> > China have tone?
>
> As far as I know.  It's an areal feature covering much of East Asia.
>
> > Is there a Sino-Tibetan language that doesn't have tone?
>
> Some of the languages in the Himalayan branch of Tibeto-Burman don't.
How about Malay/Indonesian? They are non-tonal. Or are they regarded as a
different language family?

> > 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.
[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.


T

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