[Lingtyp] Loss of tone

[Adam James Ross Tallman]

Hey Joo,

There's a quasi debate about this in Pano languages. Tone is reconstructed
in the Proto-Pano (or "Reconstructed Pano") by Loos, but many contemporary
languages do not have it very often and when they do, it's often privative.
I've analyzed Chacobo as a tonal language (H, 0 contrast), because those H
tones are neither culminative and obligatory in the phonological word, but
they tend to be, and a slight shift in the boundaries of the phonological
word (which in my view would be more contingent on the linguist) and then
they would be at least obligatory. If you found evidence that when there is
more than one H-tone one is more prominent (I can't hear it), then maybe
one of the tones is secondary stress. Whatever you say its a boundary case
primarily because of prolific tone reduction rules (Meeussen and
anti-Meeussen rules). Also, it turns out that length is a correlate of the
privative high tone. At what point does the system become stress?

(if you want I can send you a paper on this topic in Chacobo)

Adam

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 8:36 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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-- 
Adam J.R. Tallman
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Investigador del Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, la Paz
ELDP -- Postdoctorante
CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
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