Re: Three vowel grades

En réponse à David Stokes <dstokes1@...>:

> Greetings all,
>
> I have been a list member for a while, but I went "no mail" when I
> moved
> a year ago and have not been posting. I looked in on the Yahoo list
> from
> time to time to keep up. But I'm back now and working on languages
> again.
>
Welcome back!

>
> I need three vowel grades. Something like tense/lax but I need three
> of
> them and most of the distinctions I can think of only give two. Does
> anyone have a suggestion?
>
> Here's what I'm doing.
>
> 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. Falling is the next most stressed, because it is in the word
> roots.
> High and low are least stressed, and could fall together since, for
> the
> most part, they follow from the other two. I was thinking about
> something like the English lax vowels for them.
>
> I'm not wild about rounding, which is the other distinction I know
> about.
>
> So send me your ideas, maybe you can clue me into something I don't
> know
> about (not hard to do). There are several dialects so maybe I'll use
> several suggestions. If anyone knows about real world languages that
> have lost tones I'd be happy to learn about what happened to them.
>
OK, since you have tones, I suggest creaky and/or breathy voice, since they are
often present in tone languages. And if you don't mind having voiceless vowels
(rare when phonemic but present in American languages with phonemic status),
take a gradation voiceless-voiced-creaky voiced. A very good example of creaky
voice for use for Americans is Marge Simpson's voice. She does constant creaky
voice :))) . As for how that could have originated, you should ask Teoh who (I
think) has creaky voice associated with tone in her mother tongue Hokkien.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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