Re: tonal languages

Kou scripsit:

> Voiced *anything* (b, d, g, v, z, l, m, n, ng, ny, voiced h, voiced
> pinyin j, voiced pinyin x) is going to be be either yang qu or yang ru
> in Shanghainese, both "rising tones", though yin ping syllables starting
> with l, m, or n, seem to retain their yin pinginess. By "though not
> vice versa," are you saying that all voiced stuff falls into yang qu
> (true, but yang ru is also a possibility) (save the yin ping exception
> mentioned above) but that not all yang qu syllables have voiced consonants
> (I don't think this is true, unless you could give some counterexamples)?
Well, on a very quick inspection I think you are right, but there are also
definitely yin ping vs. yang qu contrasts for y- initials, e.g. y@<rnd> = you3
= 'exist' is yang qu, whereas the first syllable of y@ngwe = yin1wei2 =
'because' is yin ping.  Sorry I don't have a proper minimal pair.

Still, if we neglect this, we can say that yanginess goes with voiced
initials, and ru-iness definitely goes with glottal stop, so the only live
tone contrast is that between ping and qu, which explains why you can find
pages that say Shanghainese has only two tones, or even no tones at all,
but only a stress accent (presumably ping=stressed, qu=unstressed).

I like this comment from Ramsey, which makes it clear that the tone changes
are really phrasal tones rather than tone sandhi as such:

        y@<rnd> 'oil' and diO 'strip' are both pronounced in isolation
        with a very low register (i.e. yang qu).  But when they combine
        in the colloquial compound y@<rnd>diO 'a Chinese-style cruller'
        (you2tiao2), they lose their individual tones and the compound
        word as a whole is pronounced with a single tone envelope, which
        rises from low to high, then begins to fall again at the end of
        the compound.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
"It's the old, old story. Droid meets droid. Droid becomes chameleon.
Droid loses chameleon, chameleon becomes blob, droid gets blob back
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