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Re: THEORY: Tonogenesis

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 2, 2005, 20:32
 --- Kevin Athey <kevindeanathey@...> schrieb:

> In a related question, has anyone else dealt with > tonogenesis in their > conlangs? I try to make my work as natural as > possible, which makes > diachronic linguistics a terrible pain anyway, and > with tonogenesis to boot > I'm feeling a little out of my depth.
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. Basically, the rising tone was the result of a LH word collapsing into a single syllable, giving a rising tone in the process. A collapsed HL word would just give a low tone; it just 'seems' the more logical thing, from me actually pronouncing these words. High and low tones were still present, but since most polysyllabic words collapsed, only those words that started out with level or falling tone contours remained level. Examples (circumflex represents high tone): nâgin -> nàin kânu -> kàn anâ -> ná ...and so on. That's pretty simple tonogenesis; I'm sure some language out there has a more complex, involved process. ___________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 250MB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de

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Kevin Athey <kevindeanathey@...>