Re: tonal language

<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
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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.

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