Re: Lots of Questions About Tones

John Vertical 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 think the Austro-Asiatic family (Viet, Khmer, some lgs. as far afield as
India, et al.) may be a counter example to this. IINM there are non-tonal
lgs. (India, the "aboriginal" lgs. of Malaysia); Khmer is said to be en
route via its register system, while Viet and other AA lgs. in that country
are tonal.

IIRC, according to Matisoff, initial voiced/voicelss contrasts are one of
the main causative factors in tonogenesis--vd.stops promoting register
contrasts, ultimately leading to tonal contrasts.

In fact, is Tibetan tonal?

It's possible that development of tones in SE Asia is an areal phenomenon,
likely due to heavy Chinese influence, if not Sino-Tibetan substrata.

Not sure if there are any non-tonal Tai languages, but if Tai is
ultimately/very distantly related to Austronesian (as is claimed, and
believed by some), then that too is a counter-example. Some of the few AN
languages spoken in Vietnam (Cham and relatives) have developed tones,
clearly under local influence. Also, I've heard tell of tonal AN languages
within Indonesia, but don't know the details-- if they exist, they would
surely by spontaneous developments.

I'd suspect that African (but they apparently have systems different than
the better-known Asian ones) and Central American tone languages have
non-tonal relatives. I've seen a rather convincing paper aligning Mayan
(tonal) with a non-tonal language or languages of South America (in Chile or
Bolivia, I forget which)


>
>Tone developing from pitch accent is also a pathway to remember. And then
>there's the fact that a tone system may change without external motivation
>("drift"), especially once there's any sort of a countour contrast in
>place. BTW,
>I'm under the impression that "glide" tones are included under contour
>tones,
>as long as the "glideness" is phonemic. Er, tonemic.
>
>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?
>
>John Vertical

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