Re: Three vowel grades

* David Stokes said on 2002-12-24 19:06:55 +0100
> The parent language has 4 tones: rising, falling, high and low.  Rising
> and falling form the core of the word with high and low mostly in the
> affixes. High and low follow from the others, with High before falling
> and after rising, low before rising and after falling. There are 4
> vowels, i, u, a, o, which can each take all the tones.
>
> The child language, which is what I am working on now, is losing the
> tones. I would like to spread out the vowels so that I can have maybe 12
> vowels total.
>
> Rising will be the most stressed, so maybe the 'pure' vowels i u a o for
> it.
Why not lengthening?

i > i: etc., and then the i: could be skewed further, to diphthongs,
like in English: "divine - divinity". The |i| in |vine| was long
once. Further on, the diphthongs could be monophthongized to entrirely
different vowels, [aI] to [e] is quite common.

i [i] > i: > ai > e [e]
a [a] > a: > au > å [O]

Furthermore, there's derounding, unvoicing, making them creaky, breathy,
nasalized, denazalized, rhoticiziced. Not three degrees, but you'll still
increase the number of vowels.


t.