Re: THEORY: Tonogenesis

On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, FFlores wrote:

> I'm looking for help on the mechanism of tonogenesis,
> since I think I want to try a tonal language (maybe
> developing from some lang I already have). A Web search
> has been remarkably poor in results, so I'd thank anyone
> who can tell me about tonogenesis, or give me some
> pointers.
>
> The one resource I've found is
>
>     A Critical Review of Norman's _Chinese_
>     Marjorie K.M. Chan and James H.Y. Tai
>
> and it says that the presence of [?] and [h] in codas
> may have something to do with pitch rising and lowering,
> respectively,
I can report that in Gosiute Shoshoni, there is now an emerging
tonal contrast triggered by the loss of medial glottal stops. In
Western Shoshoni (Gosiute's nearest neighbor), medial glottal
stops are still present. Comparing the two dialects, we see that
the loss of medial glottal stop has left behind a HL contour in
Gosiute (which probably exists in Western Shoshoni as well, but
there's a glottal stop still there).

        WS              Gosiute

        tso?appyh       tsóàppyh        'ghost'
        tsoappyh        tsóáppyh        'shoulder'

> and mentions an "entering tone" (which, I
> seem to remember, has something to do with the voicing
> of the onset consonant).
I think Roger already pointed out that it seems to be the case
that a voiced initial consonant may trigger low tone, following
which the voiced consonant will devoice.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu