Re: Three vowel grades

> 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~

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