<div dir="ltr"><br>Whoops. I meant to share with everyone. <div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Larry M. HYMAN</strong> <span dir="auto"><<a href="mailto:hyman@berkeley.edu">hyman@berkeley.edu</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Sep 27, 2021 at 1:15 PM<br>Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Multidimensional transcription of tones<br>To: JOO, Ian [Student] <<a href="mailto:ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk">ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk</a>><br></div><br><br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL"">Dear Ian,</p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><br>

Thanks for your question. Don Killian and David Gil have already offered valuable

responses, but let me add some further thoughts concerning to your two related

questions:</p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""> </p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL"">1) <span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Why

are tones transcribed based on pitch only?</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">2)  Why are there no such cross-linguistically

unified symbols to describe tones which have other laryngeal components such as

creakiness or breathiness?</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Concerning

the first, there are exceptions where transcriptions of tone have included

other indications, as David points out for Vietnamese. As both he and Don also point

out, there is a significant typological difference in the tone systems of SEA

vs. other areas (or to borrow Jim Matisoff’s terminology, the Sinosphere vs.

the world). In a recent handbook article, Will Leben have a section on two views of “tone” with the §4.1.2 header “Tone as pitch versus tone package”,

where the “package” idea (or “tonation” as Bradley 1982 calls it) is the SEA

situation where tones often have language-specific laryngeal and durational

properties--think of the shortness of the high-low falling tone 4 in Standard

Mandarin. (A related SEA package-related intuition is that tonal contours are

indivisible units.) What this means is that there will be a lot of extra language-specificity

in the tonal categories in such languages vs. “pitch” as the unifying property in

all languages said to have tone.</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Your

second question contrasts diacritically marked tone packages with transcriptions

such as [p] and [b] which stand for a combination of features. Of course we

could ask the same question about other phonetic properties such as nasalization:

Why does the IPA use a tilde to transcribe [ã], [i᷉] and [u᷉] rather than

inventing new symbols, and similarly for ATR, RTR and a number of other

features? The easy answer is that this would require a lot of symbols, but

maybe there’s more to this.</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">I am

reminded of when I was first introduced to tonal contrasts in an undergraduate

Igbo class (way back when!). In order to underscore the importance of getting

the tones right, our professor Wm. E. Welmers made the point that a high tone [á]

was as different from a low tone [à] as the vowel [a] it is from another vowel,

e.g. [e] (the [+ATR] counterpart of [a] in Igbo). While perhaps pedagogically

useful, the Pike, Welmers, and autosegmental view of tone is that pitch is

quite separate from the segments, much freer from, say, the vowel features than

any vowel features are from each other. This would include those features like

nasality or ATR/RTR which can harmonize across several syllables, but do not

have the “at a distance” freedom of a high tone, which can shift one or more

words away, as in Giryama (Hyman & Leben 2021:62, based on Volk 2011).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><img src="cid:ii_ku336a810" alt="image.png" width="603" height="189" style="margin-right:0px"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt">Although there may also be other factors, it is not linguistically

surprising that [p, t, k] and [a, e, i, o u] have their own symbols, and glottalization,

breathiness, aspiration and nasalization are transcribed with an extra

diacritic.</span><br></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Finally,

I should point out that there’s a separate question of how important or useful

featural analyses of tone are. There are, of

course, a few cases where the features come in handy (Hyman 2010, McPherson

2017), but usually the numbers or H, L etc. suffice to define and describe the properties of the individual tones (Clements et al 2010). While

originally historically motivated, synchronic substitutions of one tonal “package” for another in Chinese

tone sandhi often do not look phonetically natural.</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">I

hope this is useful, although I’m sure inadequate in addressing what could

easily turn into a foundational issue or more (as Adam Tallman points out).</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Best

regards, Larry</span></p>

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">References</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Bradley,

David. 1982. Tonation. <i>Papers in

Southeast Asian Linguistics 8. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL"">Clements, G. N., Michaud, Alexis and Patin, Cédric.

2010. Do we need tone features? In John A. Goldsmith, Elizabeth Hume and Leo

Wetzels (eds)

<i>Tones and features: Phonetic and

phonological perspectives</i>, 3-24. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter

Mouton.<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL"">Hyman,

Larry M. 2010. Do tones have features? In John A. Goldsmith, Elizabeth Hume, and Leo

Wetzels (eds) Tones and features:

Phonetic and phonological perspectives, 50-80. Berlin and Boston:

de

Gruyter Mouton.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Hyman, Larry M. & William R. Leben. 2021. </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Word prosody II: Tone systems. In

Carlos Gussenhoven & Aoju Chen (eds), <i>Handbook

of Prosody,</i> 45-65. Oxford University Press.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL"">

</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">McPherson, Laura. 2017. Tone

features revisited: Evidence from Seenku (Mande, Burkino Fasso). In D. Payne,

S. Pachiarotti, and M. Bosire (eds), Diversity in African Languages: Selected

Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 5-21. Berlin:

Language Science Press.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Volk, Erez. 2011. Depression as register: Evidence from Mijikenda. <i>Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society</i>, 389-398. Berkeley, CA.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:14pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-im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<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;font-size:12pt"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0in 13.5pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Charis SIL""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></span></p></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 7:39 PM JOO, Ian [Student] <<a href="mailto:ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk" target="_blank">ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">

<div>

<div name="messageBodySection">

<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Dear typologists,</span><br>

<br>

<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">I was wondering why there isn’t a multidimensional way of transcribing tones, like how we transcribe segmental phonemes.</span><br>

<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">For example, the transcription of the voiced bilabial stop (/b/) is based on multiple dimensions of phonological features, such as [+voiced, +labial, -nasal]. </span><br>

<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">But why are tones transcribed based on pitch only, such as Chao numbers (35), tone letters (</span>˦˥<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">), tone diacritics (´`¯ˆˇ), or capital letters (HMLRF), and not encoding

 other cues, like creakiness, length, tenseness, and intensity, when these cues may be just as distinctive as pitch is?</span><br>

<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">In other words, why is there no such cross-linguistically unified symbol as to describe the [-long, +creaky, +loud, +high, +falling, +tense] tone of Burmese, when there is a cross-linguistically unified symbol to describe

 the [+voiced, +labial, -nasal] consonant of Burmese?</span><br>

<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">I would like to know why this is the case.</span></div>

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>From Hong Kong,

<div dir="auto">Ian</div>

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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Director, France-Berkeley Fund</div><div>University of California, Berkeley</div><div><a href="https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

</div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Director, France-Berkeley Fund</div><div>University of California, Berkeley</div><div><a href="https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>