THEORY: Tonogenesis (?) from PIE (Was: The rebirth of m"/21awasmql21aw)

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

> Well, delete codas, turning them into tones and different vowels, as
> you've already proposed.  To reduce them to monosyllables, you could
> simply reduce unstressed vowels to zero (which could re-introduce
> codas), or perhaps delete medial clusters, creating diphthongs, which
> could merge if you don't want diphthongs.
Just do to PIE what French did to Latin. :) And then chop the few codas
that you spared. In any case, you'll end up having a lot of homonyms, but
that happens (AFAIK) in Mandarin too, and somehow they still understand
each other.


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/pablo-david/