Re: Lots of Questions About Tones

Eugene Oh wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 12:11 AM, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
>wrote:
>
> > If I correctly gather which theories about tonogenesis are most widely-
>or
> > well-
> >  -accepted; and if I understand them to the right degree; I don't
> > understand
> > why any language has more than three tones.  To wit, a rising tone, a
> > falling
> > tone, and a level tone: with no distinction between two different rises,
> > nor
> > two different falls, nor two different level tones; and also, with no
> > contour
> > tones.
> >
>
>I suspect many of the questions will have a simple answer - consonant
>clusters and how each simplification adds a tone. I'm thinking of Middle
>Chinese, which Bernhard Karlgren reconstructed to show complex consonant
>clustering, as compared to modern Mandarin, which obviously has much
>simplified phonotactics.
>
Good observation, though not so simple in practice :-))))

If I'm not mistaken, Sino-Tibetan began with bisyllabic forms, or at least
Prefix+monosyl., where the prefix could be either C- or CV-; likewise the
Thai langs. and Austro-asiatic (Vietnamese). So the reduction of these forms
depended on--
--stress pattern
--voicing of the initial/medial/final consonants (insofar as they were
present)
--stops/fricatives/nasals/liquids-- each can have unique tonal outcomes
--deletion of vowels and treatment of resulting C-clusters
--coalescence of vowel sequences
--vowel formants/timbres ([i] seems to have higher pitch than [a] for ex.)
--likely devoicing of (esp.) final stops, with a tendency to further reduce
all contrasts in final position to a handful (eg. all stops > ?, all nasals
 > a single nasal, often [N], fricatives > h or 0, and all finals can ult.
be lost but their tonal affects survive).

Haven't made a real study of tonogenesis-- most of this is what I remember
from auditing a course with Matisoff years ago, and subsequent reading.  It
all entered into the creation of my Gwr language-- though the online paper
only deals with the sound changes, not the resulting tones,which is too big
a file (and still tentative) to upload at this point