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Re: Three vowel grades

From:Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 24, 2002, 19:47
> 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.
Well, proto-Indo-European had tonal accents, but very few modern languages still have it -- Lithuanian is the most famous example. I might incorporate tonal accents into Tech, borrowing from PIE and Afro-Asiatic languages with tone (like Hausa and other Chadic languages), in the distant future, if I ever get that far. Ma'ou Tech, the mostly Muslim tribal dialect spoken in Iran and Turkey, will have no tonal accent at all, though the Christian Qotil tribe of the Caucasus (so-called "Armenian Elves") probably will, since it is the most conservative form of the language. East African Tech ("Ethiopian Elves", a few are also in Yemen) might have tonal accents. Classical Greek of course had a pitch accent system which was lost probably by the Byzantine era, and in Modern Greek, only one kind of accent, a stress accent, is even written. Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian have tone accents (four types: rising/falling and short/long distinctions), inherited from Old Church Slavonic. Latvian does not have pitch accents like Lithuanian does. Now these are languages with pitch *accents*, rather than true tonal languages like the Sino-Tibetan languages, which is an interesting situation -- both Proto-Chinese and Proto-Tibetan seemed to have no tones at all! The tones developed from a simplification of the consonants; in the case of Tibetan, voiceless consonants left a high tone while voiced consonants left a low tone. ObConlang: The Himalayan dialect of Tech will be tonal, with three tones replacing the voiceless-voiced-ejective distinction of stops/affricates in Caucasian Tech, leaving a Burmese-like high-low-"checked" tonal paradigm. The so-called "Tibetan Elves" are pretty rare in my conworld, being the only predominately Buddhist group of the race. (So far, I only have the phonology and the geography of the language figured out, with a small number of roots from Semitic, Indo-European and Bomhard's version of Proto-Nostratic. With some ideas for grammar taken from Georgian/Kartvelian, and vowel harmony/Umlaut from Altaic.) ~Danny~

Replies

Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...>
Danny Wier <dawier@...>