Re: Tone/Pitch Accent Question

David Peterson sikyal:

> Hey all,
>
> Various tone conventions have posited that the reality of tone is such that
> tone languages have tone melodies.   A common West African set of tone melodies
> is as follows: (1) H, (2) L, (3) HL, (4) LH, and (5) HLH.   What this means
> is that you can get words with only a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 melody, so, for example,
> never LHL.   When you get to trisyllabic words, however, it's unclear to me
> whether you can get:
>
> HL pattern: h�l�me, or
> HL pattern: h�lame, or
> Both.
>
> I seem to recall that you can only get one, and if it was that way, it'd
> probably be the second, since you seem to associate tones right to left (though
> some languages can do left to right).   Either way, you can never get both.
In a strictly algorithmic tonal language, you can get one or the other,
but not both in the same language. The difference is simply one of
directionality--L to R or R to L.

However, there are tone languages that are not strictly algorithmic, in
which some tones are pre-attatched to some syllables, which would allow
both patterns above to exist in the same language.

> Bearing that in mind, I've always assumed that pitch-accent languages work
> differently.   In pitch accent languages, you can have, maximally, 1-4 tone
> melodies (all high, all low, some high then all low, or some low then all high).
> You can never go from L to H to L, or from H to L to H (this is what I've
> been told).   Anyway, let's say, for the sake of argument, that in any given tone
> language, you can only have one of the above (two highs then a low, or one
> high then two lows, never both in the same language).   If that's true for a
> tone language, is it *not* true for a pitch-accent language?   In other words,
> could you get both in a pitch-accent languages?   I've assumed that you can.
> If you cannot, though, I'm going to have to radically rework one of my
> languages.
I think that you can get both in a pitch-accent language. Like tonal
languages, you can have accents associated with specific syllables, and
then you can pretty much do whatever you want.


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://blog.glossopoesis.org

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