Re: Lots of Questions About Tones
From: | Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> |
Date: | Saturday, July 26, 2008, 2:30 |
On Jul 10, 2008, at 1:51 PM, Philip Newton wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 18:51, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:
>> In fact, is Tibetan tonal?
>
> Yes, it is -- at least, the standard Lhasa dialect does.
>
> Wikipedia says that there are dialects that did not acquire tones,
> though.
I also just learned of a Tibeto-Burman language called Qiang, of
which the Southern "dialect" has tone and the Northern one doesn't --
although Jonathan Evans claims that the Northern dialect does have a
few minimal pairs distinguished by pitch, so it might be (at least
marginally) tonal.