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Tonogenesis help.

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Saturday, August 18, 2007, 17:19
I'm presently working on a conlang whose phonology
was, in part, inspired by Tibetan and Middle Chinese.
As such, I've made it highly tonal, and I've run into
a few problems in figuring out how to go about
generating the tones in a specific syllable type.

My question is, what effect do initial ejectives have
on the syllable's tone level? I've already decided
that voiced initials give a low tone level, while
unvoiced initials give a mid or high tone level, but
where do ejectives fall into that scheme?

Perhaps the delay between the oral cavity and the
glottis opening would 'flatten' the tone, reducing a
high-to-low falling tone (/51/) something like
high-to-mid (/53/)?

I don't know, and neither Middle Chinese nor Tibetan
had ejectives, so I can't work with attested sound
changes with the reference material I have at hand
right now...

Does anyone know of languages (other than Korean,
whose 'ejectives' work by a different glottal
mechanism than those of my current project) that had
both ejectives and contrastive tone?


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Replies

ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
And Rosta <and.rosta@...>