[Lingtyp] Loss of tone

[Kofi Yakpo]

Dear Ian,

A very interesting and underresearched topic. It is very likely that all
earlier varieties of the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles spoken in
the Caribbean had lexical and grammatical tone due to transfer from African
tonal substrates during their genesis.

They presumably lost tone due to prolonged and intimate contact with
non-tonal European superstrates (English, Dutch, Spanish). The survival of
tone in isolated creoles like Saramaccan and Ndyuka, and "residual tone" in
other creoles (e.g. in Sranan, where lexical tone is restricted to
ideophones, in an otherwise intonation-only system) provides evidence. The
African English-lexifier creoles of the family have also retained tone
systems due to unbroken contact with African (tonal) adstrates (i.e.
Nigerian Pidgin, Pichi, Krio, etc).

We (with my co-author Guri Bordal Steien) have written a longer piece
("Romancing with tone: On the outcomes of prosodic contact") on the
mechanism of stress-to-tone conversion, through which the African varieties
of European standard languages have acquired tone (i.e. Centralafrican
French, Equatoguinean Spanish, Nigerian English) to be published in
Language 96.1 or 96.2. We assume that the mechanism works the other way
round too, hence via tone-to-stress conversion, but much work still remains
to be done.

Outside of the Afrosphere, the varieties of Norwegian and Swedish in
prolonged contact with Sami and Finnish have also lost tone (e.g. Jahr,
Ernst Håkon. 1984. Language contact in Northern Norway: Adstratum and
substratum in the Norwegian, Sami and Finnish of Northern Norway. Acta
Borealia 1(1). 103–112.)

Cheers,
Kofi
————
Dr Kofi Yakpo • Associate Professor • University of Hong Kong
<http://arts.hku.hk/>
Undergraduate Coordinator • Linguistics Programme
<http://www.linguistics.hku.hk/>
Resident Scholar • Chi Sun College
<http://www.chisuncollege.hku.hk/the-college/>
Web: scholars hub <http://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp01715> • academia.edu
<https://hku-hk.academia.edu/KofiYakpo> • researchgate
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kofi_Yakpo>

Open access to postprints at Zenodo
<https://zenodo.org/search?page=1&size=20&q=yakpo&sort=-publication_date>
Recent publications:
A Grammar of Pichi <http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/85>
English World-Wide: Inheritance, contact, convergence
<https://benjamins.com/catalog/eww.00028.yak>
Areal convergence in creole negation
<https://benjamins.com/catalog/coll.55.05yak>



On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 3:36 PM 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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