Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Tone: Is it Different? (Hyman)
This week's paper was posted by luy on the subreddit's Discord server, and I decided to use it as a TyPoW. It provides a general overview of what tone is, what kind of misconceptions there are among linguists and delivers some thorough natlang examples. If you're not familiar with the concept of tone at all, check out the Wikipedia page on it. Now onto this week's prompts:
- Is your language tonal?
- How many phonemic tones are there in your language?
- What's the tone-bearing unit (e.g. syllable or mora)?
- How does tone behave morphophonologically? Are there any processes going on (e.g. tone sandhi)?
- Does tone interact with phonation in your language?
- Are there register or contour tones in your language? Is there a combination of both?
- How did tones arise in your language? Did tonogenesis or tonoexodus occur?
- Does your language exhibit pitch-accent?
- If your language is not tonal, tell us about its intonation patterns!
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!