Re: tonal languages

John writes:

>Douglas Koller scripsit:
>
>>  For Shanghainese, I found:
>>
>>  1 yin ping (quelle surprise)
>>  2 yin qu
>>  3 yang qu
>>  4 yin ru (glottal stop)
>>  5 yang ru (glottal stop)
>
>Yes, I was mistaken to think that the ping tone was split.  What's really
>happened here is that yang ping has merged with yang qu, whereas the unsplit
>shang tone has merged with yin qu.  An interesting property of the
>yang qu tone
>is that all syllables with breathy voice ("voiced aspirated stops") have
>this tone, though not vice versa.
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)?

>  > I made something similar (though I'm a little confused by the
>>  high/low terms)
>
>I was thinking in Cantonese terms here.  For high read yin, for low read yang.
That's where I thought you were going but I was still confused
because although Tone 4 in Taiwanese is yin ru, it's "low" (33) while
Tone 8, yang ru, is "high" (55).

>The Hakka story AFAICT is that ping and ru are split, shang and qu are not.
Could be. I'll check.

Kou