[Lingtyp] Tonal inventories: High vs Extra-High

[Sandra Auderset]

Hi Laura,

I think your question as is can’t really be answered, because (as Ian is hinting at) tone systems can’t be directly compared. Different researchers will analyze the same language differently (depending on their theories and frameworks etc.), so you might end up with the same system being described as high vs. extra-high by one researcher and mid vs. high by another. In my experience (working with Mixtecan languages), researchers quite often disagree about how many tonemes there are or whether a system should be analyzed as having a tone-less unit or not, because these are just tricky questions.

So maybe it would help to add some detail about the system you are describing - the distribution of the tones, the average pitch levels, etc. depending on what exactly you are interested in. Then it would be easier to see for others whether they are familiar with such a system regardless of the labels attached to the tone levels.

All the best,
Sandra

—
Sandra Auderset
PhD Candidate | [she/her]
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology
&
Department of Linguistics
University of California Santa Barbara

> On Wednesday, Jan 27, 2021 at 16:12, JOO Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk (mailto:ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk)> wrote:
> Dear Laura,
>
> If a language has High tone, Extra-High tone, and No-tone (phonetically Low, I assume), then what would stop us from calling them Mid and High tones instead of High and Extra-High?
>
> From Hong Kong,
> Ian
>
> On 27 Jan 2021, 11:06 PM +0800, ARNOLD Laura <Laura.Arnold at ed.ac.uk>, wrote:
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > Does anyone know how frequent two-tone inventories contrasting only High and Extra-High are? I’m working with data from a language which has an inventory that can possibly be analysed this way (the two tones also contrast with toneless syllables). I suspect this is quite an unusual inventory, cross-linguistically – it would be helpful to confirm this. I would also be interested to hear about similar examples elsewhere in the world.
> >
> > Many thanks, Laura
> >
> > ~~~
> > Laura Arnold – British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
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> >
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