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Tone and stress in Glossotechnia

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Saturday, February 16, 2008, 2:49
So far there are no cards in the Glossotechnia decks specifying how
tone and stress
are used in the game-language.  I've thought of adding some, but am
not sure how
to structure them.

For instance, I could have a few Stress cards with simple rules like
Initial, Penultimate, Final... but it would be better to have some way of
combining multiple cards to form/express more complex stress rules
(such as stress determined by length or closedness of syllables,
or by grammatical considerations).  Have y'all any ideas on how to do that?

I don't know enough about tone, phonemic or otherwise, to create cards
specifying a particular tone system.  Maybe I could have a "Phonemic Contrast"
card that makes tone phonemic for vowels (like the Nasalization, Rounding,
and Length cards for vowels or Voicing, Palatalization, Labialization,
Aspiration
cards for consonants).  Then the player who puts that "Phonemic Contrast: Tone"
card in play can specify what tones the language distinguishes. How to
make tone significant in non-phonemic ways, though? -- Maybe just point out
in the rules that a player who introduces a grammatical category could make
it marked by tone instead of or as well as via an affix, mutation,
word order change
or whatever.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry