Re: THEORY: Tonogenesis

 --- Kevin Athey <kevindeanathey@...> schrieb:

> >From: Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
> >
> >In my most recent conlang, Gi-nàin, there existed
> >three tones (rising, high and low), which were the
> >remnants of a previous pitch-accent system. There
> was
> >also quite significant tone sandhi.
>
> <snip>
>
> I like that.  It's pretty.  Is Gi-nàin online
> somewhere?
Why, thank you :). Aesthetics were a major
consideration. Actually; I was a bit in error in my
description; Gi-nàin doesn't have a rising tone;
instead, it's a falling tone, and it was formed
through the erosion of HL clusters.

I chose that because it mimicked the V+[6] clusters in
some dialects of German, which I think are beautiful.
I think the most beautiful word in German is /früher/
[fRy:6], and I basically expanded it from there, like
Tolkien and his 'cellar door'.

But alas, there's no material on Gi-nàin online; I'm
working on a major revision and plan to put bits and
pieces of it on my LiveJournal, until I write the
Ultimate Überguide to Gi-nàin, which I plan to print
out for my own personal reference and maybe put it on
its own website.

> Actually, that's very similar to the system I'm
> playing with.
> Pre-Þewthaj had a simple, non-phonemic stress
> accent.  At some point, heavy substratum from an
> aboriginal lanugage I haven't yet named caused it to
> borrow the latter's pitch accent system, keeping the
> same point of accent.
Nice. A neighboring language to Gi-nàin, Tveola, has
had some impact, mainly on the borrowing of the /v/
[P] phoneme, replacing the native [w] phoneme in many
environments. Tveola is an agglutinating language, but
it's becoming more and more isolating and
monosyllabic, thanks to influence from Gi-nàin, which
is a more 'prestigious' language, since the Gi are a
coastal people and thus, are more reliant on trade,
while the Tveola live in the forests and mountains
more inland, with some river access, but no direct
coastal access.

> This pitch accent system raises the pitch of the
> accented syllable and the syllable prior, or the
> last syllable, if the word has no accented syllable.
> All others remain low.
Accent-spreading is also at work in the tone sandhi;
it works across words and can completely change the
tone of a word to make it homphonic with another. But
I haven't developed enough vocabulary for this to pop
up yet; maybe after the Great Revision.

> Now, eventually all syllables after the accented one
> were lost or collapsed into a coda, while all
> syllables before were lost collapsed into either an
> onset cluster or a single extra-short syllable.
---<snip>---
> Does that seem reasonable?  Bear in mind I really
> like naturalistic complications.
I really love that system; it sounds a bit like
Chinese with the loss of voicing causing a difference
in tone (actually, with Chinese, it was mostly the
loss of the voiced aspirates), though Chinese has
always been roughly monosyllabic, so complications due
to the erosion of onsets or codas were minimal. I was
thinking of doing Future English as a monosyllabic
tonal language that had lost its voicing distinction,
but it never got past the thinking-about-it stage.

Anyone ever done something like that?


	

	
		
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