Re: intonation in your conlangs

On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 02:11:51PM -0500, Estel Telcontar wrote:
> I've been observing that when I speak or read Ikanirae Seru, my
> intonation pattern is different from how I talk in English.  I think it
> has something to do with all the syllables being (C)V - the rhythm is
> more regular and almost staccato, and there seems to be some sort of
> correlation between stress and pitch - stressed syllables usually have
> a higher pitch than unstressed ones, but sometimes it's the other way
> round, I haven't figured out the pattern yet if there is one.
>
> Anyone else notice that they have different intonation patterns in
> their conlang?
[snip]

Definitely. Recently I've noticed that Ebisédian, which is pitch-accented
with two phonemic pitches doesn't just have high pitch and low pitch;
the two phonemic pitches are in fact realized as several (non-phonemic)
tones:

- A short, stressed syllable has phonemic high pitch, which is realized as
  [55]. However, under some circumstances (such as the end of a sentence),
  the high pitch may be dropped to low pitch instead.

- A long stressed syllable has phonemic high pitch, which is realized as
  a falling tone like [52] or even a rising-and-falling tone [352].

- Unstressed syllables (short and long) have phonemic low pitch, realized
  as low pitch [11]; but if sandwiched between two syllables of high
  pitch, they may have rising tone [13] instead.

- Two adjacent syllables with phonemic high pitch often do not have the
  same high pitch; one may be higher than the other for stress or for
  sentential euphony.

For example, the following sentence may be read with the marked
inflections (1=lowest pitch, 5=highest pitch, ala IPA tone numbers):

	ghu' 3jum33'    le's loo'ru?
CXS:	Gu   ?@\dZum@\: l&s  lo:r`u
Pitch:	 52   1   1 13   3    52  1

The syllables suffixed with /'/ are high-pitched syllables. But as you can
see, they are variously realized, especially in the sequence of three
phonemic high pitches, which slowly ascend to peak in the syllable _loo'_.


T

--
EMACS = Extremely Massive And Cumbersome System