Re: Music-conlangs & music

Hi!

R A Brown writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > Are there langs that express grammatical categories in modes?
> > E.g. Major=indicative, Minor=subjunctive, Dorian=question?  And maybe
> > Phrygian=imperative?  That'd be quite cool. :-)
>
> Not that I know of.
>
> > But if the utterance is too short to make the mode clear, you might
> > end up with some ambiguities.  Hehe.
>
> True. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to use different modes in
> this way.
Hmm, feasible, yes, I think so.  Even if tones alone were used for
encoding, I'd expect quite a few notes to be needed to make an
utterance.  In a seven phoneme tone-only language, I'd be confident
that the ambiguities would be seldom.

If it was a 'normal' tone-language that also has spoken words, you
could mark subject, object and verb with different tones, thereby
ensuring that you'd have at least the distinction minor vs. major even
for subject + verb with only one syllable, i.e., two tones.  With an
object, you could have the other distinctions, too, if you don't have
too many modes.

I think it is worth a try, the idea is funny. :-)

E.g.:

    Tone:      1  2  3  4  5  6  7
  Lydian:      C  D  E  F# G  A  B   -- used for imperatives
  Mixolydian:  C  D  E  F  G  A  Bb  -- used for indicative
  Dorian:      C  D  Eb F  G  A  Bb  -- used for subjunctive
  Phrygian:    C  Db Eb F  G  Ab Bb  -- used for questions

(C is just an example, the tones are not absolute notes, but the scale
may start for anything comfortable with the speaker.)

So Lydian and Mixolydian are Major and distinguished by two tones, and
Dorian and Phrygian are Minor and also distinguished by two tones.
(The distance between Mixolydian and Dorian is only one tone, but I
like Dorian and Phrygian very much, therefore I selected those.  The
choice is quite arbitrary, of cause.)

Let basic word order be free (for now), constituents marked by tone.
For each constituent, we reserve two tones, the first one for the
first syllable, the second one, if present, for the last syllable.  For
longer words, we could define some pattern of the towe tones.
The tones could be:

    Verb:     1 & 4
    Subject:  3 & 7
    Object:   2 & 6

Tone 5 is free for being assigned otherwise.  Obviously from the
table, it carries no information wrt. mode.  We could use it for
marking particles.

We can now distinguish:

1-syl. verb, 1-syl. subject:    IND./IMP.  from SUBJ./QU.
2-syl. verb, 1-syl. subject or
1-syl. verb, 2-syl. subject:    IND. from IMP. from SUBJ./QU.

SUBJ. vs. QU. is distinguished by the object tone.

Example:
  pi   = you
  ta   = eat
  laku = find
  mu   = fish

  ta.C        pi.E.        = You eat.     / Eat!
  ta.C        pi.Eb.       = Do you eat?  / (whatever subjunctive expresses)
  la.C.ku.F   pi.E   mu.D.  = You find fish.
  la.C.ku.F#  pi.E   mu.D.  = Find fish!
  la.C.ku.F   pi.Eb  mu.Db. = Do you find fish.
  ...

What do you think of such a system?

**Henrik

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