[Lingtyp] Loss of tone

Fri Nov 8 15:51:04 UTC 2019

Thanks, Randy, for bringing Wayne Lea's article to the attention of
everyone. I distinctly remember Wayne creating the term "tonoexodus" at our
workshop on "Consonant types and tone" in 1973 as a welcome counterpart to
Jim Matisoff's "tonogenesis". You can find it on page 66 of his article:

"Similar arguments about 'tonogenesis' and 'tonoexodus' might be made for
any major FØ effects due to the manner of consonant articulation (such as
as sonorant versus obstruent contrast) or suprasegmental influences such as
constituent structure and positions in total intonation contours."

Although less easy to study the mechanisms of such a change, quite a number
of languages have lost tone, including Niger-Congo (NC) and other African
languages. See page 71 of this,

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1t692652

published as:

Hyman, Larry M. 2017. On reconstructing tone in Proto-Niger-Congo. In
Valentin Vydrin & Anastasia Lyakhovich (eds),* In the hot yellow Africa*,
175-191. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria.

However, the term "tonoexodus" has not caught on the same way as
"tonoexodus".

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 5:51 AM Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks very much, Rikker! I had looked for the volume online but couldn’t
> find it. In the Lea article the term “tonoexodus” as a term doesn’t appear,
> but the expression “genesis and exodus of tonal contrasts” does appear.
> I’ll have to ask Jim if that is where he got the idea.
>
> All the best,
> Randy
> -----
> *Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁地）
> Professor of Linguistics, with courtesy appointment in Chinese, School of
> Humanities
> Nanyang Technological University
> HSS-03-45, 48 Nanyang Avenue | Singapore 639818
> http://randylapolla.net/
> Most recent books:
> *The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd Edition (*2017)
>
> https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324
> *Sino-Tibetan Linguistics *(2018)
>
> https://www.routledge.com/Sino-Tibetan-Linguistics/LaPolla/p/book/9780415577397
>
>
>
>
>
> On 8 Nov 2019, at 9:30 PM, Rikker Dockum <rikker.dockum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>> -----
>> *Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA* （羅仁地）
>> Professor of Linguistics, with courtesy appointment in Chinese, School of
>> Humanities
>> Nanyang Technological University
>> HSS-03-45, 48 Nanyang Avenue
>> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/03-45,+48+Nanyang+Avenue+%7C+Singapore?entry=gmail&source=g>
>>  |
>> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/03-45,+48+Nanyang+Avenue+%7C+Singapore?entry=gmail&source=g>
>>  Singapore
>> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/03-45,+48+Nanyang+Avenue+%7C+Singapore?entry=gmail&source=g>
>> 639818
>> http://randylapolla.net/
>> Most recent books:
>> *The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd Edition (*2017)
>>
>> https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324
>> *Sino-Tibetan Linguistics *(2018)
>>
>> https://www.routledge.com/Sino-Tibetan-Linguistics/LaPolla/p/book/9780415577397
>>
>>
>>
>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Lingtyp mailing list
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>>
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-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director,
France-Berkeley Fund
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
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