Re: Lots of Questions About Tones

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:16:29 -0400, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

>I've also seen the claim that no language ever originally *develop'd* tone from
>initial consonants; that their effect is much subtler than that of codas,
and so
>a split thus conditioned may only occur in a language that's tonal to begin
with.

I thought Punjabi was a counterexample to this.  Sanskrit was toneless, but
Punjabi has tone AIUI only as a reflex of the former presence of the breathy
voiced <bh dh d.h jh gh>.

>Personally tho, I would be much more interested in what *effects* tones may
>have. Stress can trigger all kinds of things, but tone? And I mean level /
>countour tone, not "register tone" (creaky / clear / brethy / etc). Can it
>trigger even vowel quality changes, or is it a dead-end feature that just won't
>affect anything else?
This is something I'd like to know as well.

In addition to development of registers with phonation contrasts, a couple
other effects I could imagine are tones giving rise to (originally
concomitant and subphonemic) vowel length, or a tone system which has
undergone enough sandhi and assimilation effects that it's interpretable as
a pitch accent system getting reinterpreted to stress accent.

I've seen a fair number of examples of related pairs of langs where tones in
one correspond to one of these features in the other, but this situation
leaves open the possibility that the tones developed from the other stuff.
I can't think of an example I've seen where it can be shown to have run the
other way.

Maybe vowel quality should be in there?  I read in Vajda's writings on Ket a
little while back that /E V O/ are realised [e 7 o] under the high
glottalised toneme, and that /a/ is variously [A a &] in the different tones.

Alex