Re: Tono....death?

En réponse à Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:

>     First off, what's the opposite of tonogenesis?
Tonoapocalypse? ;))))

 That is, the process
> by which
> tones die out in a language. 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? (Would ancient Greek count as tonal, or
> just
> pitch accent?)
Pitch accent.

 While I'm at it, would someone care to define the
> difference
> between pitch accent and tone?
The simpler form of explanation is: pitch accent is realised as a rise in
pitch, but the rules to position this rise of pitch can be formulated in terms
of accented syllable. Basically, instead of a rise in volume you have a rise in
pitch.. Pitch accent can also have rules for propagation of the high tone
(meaning that the high tone can be put on more than one syllable, unlike a
stress in a stress accent system), but those are secondary. So basically, in a
pitch accent system there are two pitches: high and low, and in one word only
one syllable (or mora, or whatever the prosodic unit is in that case) receives
a high pitch (just like in a stress system only one syllable receives the
stress). This is the stressed syllable. The high pitch may also propagate after
the stressed syllable (like in Japanese), even beyond the word limit itself,
but the main phenomenon is the rise of pitch, not its lowering.

On the other hand, in a tone system, each prosodic unit receives a distinct
tone, and even in systems with only two flat tones (register tone systems like
in some African languages), a single word can receive more than one high pitch,
or even be completely high pitched. That's what separates tone with pitch
accent: in tone systems, the pitch is a syllable feature, just like its onset,
coda, syllabic peak, etc..., while accent systems, whether stress or pitch, can
be described as prosodic features, features of the word (or the prosodic unit,
like in French where it's the phrase which is the prosodic unit, not the word).

I hope the explanation is clear enough :) . I admit I can be very confusing
with my explanations, so ask again if I was unclear.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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