Re: THEORY: Tonogenesis

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Lukasz K. wrote:
> >Are there any tonal languages with well known tonogenesis or evolution of
> >tones?
>
> There are a number of interesting refs. on google (search "tonogenesis"),
> but nothing very specific.  Check jounals devoted to Sino-Tibetan for
> articles by James Matisoff, who IIRC is responsible for coining the term.
> Years ago I sat in on a course of his, but didn't alas pay much attention,
> and don't have any notes.
[snip useful families to look at]

> This applies I think, to tone languages of the Chinese sort; African
> languages seem to have different systems.  Mayan languages are also tonal,
> but I know next to nothing about them.....
From my not terribly systematic exposure to Quiche, it has
IIRC three tones (low, mid, and high) which vary independently
of stress, all of which are marked with a terribly clunky
orthography, and I think some pretty complicated tone sandhi
phenomena which I haven't quite figured out yet.  No contour
tones, I don't think:  phonemically long vowels are consistently
of one tone or another.

(I may be wrong on some of this.)

> But among the things I remember are:  initial voiced stops (especially)
> tend to produce low tones; then if, in addition, the stops devoice you get
> contrasting **pá (high tone) < *p-, **pà (low) < *b-.  Also, it seems,
> there are tendencies final -h > high, final -? > low.  And I'd assume
> that stress placement on bi- or polysyllabic forms would produce
> different tones.
IIRc, in some languages of the Pacific Northwest, low tone has
developed from the loss of a preceding glottal stop and other
laryngeal-like consonants.

Anyways, Matthew Chen put out a Cambridge theory book on tone
sandhi just a few years ago, which addresses tonogenesis some:

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521652723/
qid=1031729891/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-8568275-1084121?v=glance&s=books>

As expected of Cambridge, this theory book is outrageously
expensive (at $80.00) and so you might want to check out your
local library first.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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