Re: tonal language

John Q:
> <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
>
> >Does it exists? a nat/conlang in wich tones serve to grammatical uses?
> >I also tought to use the stress for a grammatical use
> ___________________________
> Ithkuil uses both stress (ultimate, penultimate, antepenultimate, and
> preantepenultimate) and tone (falling, high, rising, and "broken")
> grammatically.  In nouns/verbs, stress is used to designate the
> morphological category called Perspective, while tone is used to designate
> the category called Context.  For the other word class, called adjuncts,
> stress and tone are used to indicate mood of the verb, as well as
> differentiating between various personal reference categories.  For
> details, see Sections 1.3.2, 1.3.3, 3.3, 3.6, 6.5 and 8.1 of the Ithkuil
> grammar at http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Ithkuil.
>
> It should be noted, however, that Ithkuil is a philosophical language
(what
> some folks on this board call "engelangs"), not a natlang-style conlang.
> If I recall correctly, however, at least some of the African tone
languages
> do use tone to distinguish grammatical categories.  I seem to recall that
> Yoruba is such a language.  (I believe there are 3 tones in Yoruba).  I'll
> try and look it up.
Among conlangs, Guaspi uses tone solely to mark syntactic structure.
And in Livagian, marked tones occur only in closed-class morphemes;
marked tones on open-class words are themselves inflectional
morphemes.

--And.