[Lingtyp] Loss of tone

[Rikker Dockum]

Hi Randy,

Right you are, thanks for the correction! I had misremembered. Since
Matisoff used “tonogenesis” in a couple of papers before 1973, as early as
1970 if memory serves, he is a likely candidate and known word coiner,
though in any case, “tonogenesis” and “tonoexodus” form a clever pair.

I’ve sometimes lamented that we don’t have a similar term for “tone change”
that refers specifically to diachronic change within established tone
systems, but it’s probably unnecessary. Or perhaps just that everything I
brainstormed sounded terrible!

That entire 1973 volume is available here:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/56/docs/SCOPIL1-consonant_types_and_tone.pdf

Best,
Rikker

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 8:15 AM Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Rikker,
> Not to diminish the importance of Martha’s work, but the term “tonoexodus”
> was used in two papers in the 1973 *Consonant Types and Tones *volume
> edited by Larry Hyman *(Southern California Occasional Papers in
> Linguistic No. 1): *Matisoff, James A. "Tonogenesis in Southeast Asia"
> (for whom gaining and losing tones is a cyclical phenomenon), and Lea,
> Wayne A. "Segmental and suprasegmental influences on fundamental frequency
> contours". (Actually don’t have a copy of the latter, so can’t check if the
> term is used there, but Matisoff cites that article when he mentions the
> term.)
>
> Randy
> -----
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>
>
> On 8 Nov 2019, at 8:39 PM, Rikker Dockum <rikker.dockum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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