Re: THEORY: Tonogenesis

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,
The development of tone in Tlingit is very simple to observe.  The southern
dialect Tongass has secondary articulations for modifying vowels, while the
other dialects have tone and no other secondary articulations.  Vowels in
Tongass that are regular (ie, short and unmodified) or breathy correspond to
low tone in the other dialects; creaky and long vowels correspond to high
tone.

There is an interesting correlation with the Chinese case then.  Breathiness
and [h] (aspiration?) cause low tone, creakiness and [?] (glottalization)
cause
high tone.

Marcus