Re: Pitch

En réponse à Pablo David Flores <pablo-flores@...>:

>
> Tonothanasis? Tonolisis? Detonation? :)
>
I like tonolysis, gives me the mental image of tones floating in some sort of
liquid and suddenly exploding like littel bubbles, the fragments left deriving,
dead, in the liquid :)) .

>
> Can't it be a drop?
Probably, although I yet have to see a pitch-accented language that has that.

>
>     1) There's one and only one pitch change, either a
>        drop or a rise.
That'd make it a pitch-accented language, since it means that whatever the
number of syllables, you need only to mark one to know exactly the pitch of all
syllables.

>     2) The pitch change appears between two syllables.
That's the normal thing in pitch-accented languages, which normally only have
flat tones.

>     3) If the pitch change appears after the N-th syllable,
>        there must be at least N syllables after it.
>
> So you can have HL, LH, HLL, LHH, but not LLH or HHL
> or LHL or HLH. What is this?
>
I'd say pitch-accent. Since you only need to mark the syllable in front of
which (or after which, both markings would be possible) the pitch change
happens, and which pitch it has itself, to know for sure the pitch of all
syllables in the word, I'd say it's a pitch-accent.

>
> I've noticed it (in a couple of movies). Is it possible
> to have both pitch and stress accent (one of them maybe
> being not phonemical, but not free either), and have
> them being orthogonal/independent?
>
I'd say yes. For instance, Gaelic Irish's phonemic accent is stress. This
stress accent is put on the first syllable of the word, except when there is a
long vowel, in which case the stress moves to this syllable. But another
particularity of Gaelic is that the last syllable of a word is normally always
pronounced with a high pitch (it's not a phonemic), which is so strong that
most people think Gaelic is stressed on the last syllable. So stress and pitch
can be independent, just like stress and vowel length (despite the fact that
most people who are not used to it would have difficulties to pronounce a word
whose stressed vowel is short, but which also has an unstressed long
vowel :)) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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