Re: A New Conlang For Your Consideration

On Friday, January 23, 2004, at 08:47  PM, John Quijada wrote:

> Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>> Finally, how are mid-low and falling tones distinguished in the
>> romanization?
>
> [snip]
> As for indicating tone, grammatically meaningful tones only occur on
> the
> stressed syllable (plus all subsequent syllables) of Ithkuil words,
> and can
> never be mid-low tone.  Mid-low tone is used solely for all word
> syllables
> prior to the stressed syllable as a way of indicating a new word has
> started.  No stressed syllable (or subsequent syllable) can have
> mid-low
> tone, therefore it operates in mutual exclusivity with the other four
> tones.  Since an UNMARKED STRESSED syllable can't have mid-low tone,
> its
> unmarked status is used to show falling tone.  (As for monosyllabic
> words,
> they cannot take mid-low tone, again allowing their "default"
> (unmarked)
> tone to be falling.)
Okay. I looked again, and you said this quite clearly on the website.
My fault for not reading closely enough.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we
must learn both arts."                                      - Thomas
Carlyle