[Lingtyp] Loss of tone

[Rikker Dockum]

Hi Ian,

The term “tonoexodus” was coined by Martha Ratliff (Ratliff 2015). In that
paper she describes loss of lexical tone in clusters of atonal languages in
Bantu and Atlantic, both in the otherwise tonal Niger-Congo family. The
pathway is through reanalysis of a high frequency prominent tone as accent.
And she describes another case of radical tone merger as a pathway to
likely early stage tonoexodus in Nghe An Vietnamese. There are also many
references you can follow up in there, too.

Here is the paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277816423_Tonoexodus_Tonogenesis_and_Tone_Change

Best,
Rikker Dockum


—
Rikker Dockum
Visiting Assistant Professor
Linguistics Department
Swarthmore College

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 2:36 AM Joo, Ian <joo at shh.mpg.de> wrote:

> Dear fellow typologists,
>
> Middle Korean had lexical tones, and they are well recorded in 15th
> century Korean written in Hangul, but in contemporary Korean, they are lost.
> Are there any other languages that experienced the loss of tone
> (tonothanasia?) whose written history keeps track of this loss?
> Or is Korean unique in this regard?
>
> From Jena, Germany,
> Ian
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