Re: Tono....death?

Peter Clark ta nugatu-r:

> First off, what's the opposite of tonogenesis? That is, the process by
> which tones die out in a language.
Tonoatrophia. :)

> Second, are there certain conditions which would lead to such an event?
> Are there any atonal languages today which are believed to have at one
> point been tonal?
" [...] one would expect that Teribe would have a tonal system as well,
and there are some very intriguing evidences of it. Enough, in fact, to
lead Heinze (1980) to analyze Teribe as tonal, with two tonemes, high [/]
and low [\]. However, the tonal system has faded away and been replaced
for the most part with a system of contrastive stress, so that a strictly
tonal analysis of Teribe is no longer useful. Having said that, one must
also recognize that a stress system does not entirely explain the data, as
the vestiges of the tonal system still assert themselves now and then."

"A Description of Teribe Phonology" by Perry J. Oakes
SIL International 2001

> (Would ancient Greek count as tonal, or just pitch accent?) While I'm at
> it, would someone care to define the difference between pitch accent and
> tone?
I am not feeling up to doing this. :) Here, it is 1 AM.

--

 /\   P. M. Arktayg                   pmva[at]avenned.com   /\
 \/       "rubba s.idqin ka:na ’akd_aba min kid_bin"        \/
\/\/  'często prawda jest bardziej kłamliwa niż kłamstwo'  \/\/