Zompist Bboard Again

Glenn wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 8:13 pm

gabrielswai wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 12:59 pmBased specifically on vowel height and quality, no example immediately comes to mind. However, I do know off the top of my head that Cheyenne developed tones based on the length of its vowels while being previously toneless. I briefly discuss this on page 13 of my Fiat Lingua article, where I cite this article detailing Cheyenne tonogenesis: https://doi.org/10.1086/465218. Essentially, high tones were gained on long vowels.

I learned about the Cheyenne tonogenesis of long vowels -> high tone on this board many years ago from Jeff Burke (a former member), and tried to apply it to my own (forever embryonic) conlang Chusole. The eventual concept was that the ancestral language was toneless, but had a vowel length contrast and initial stress (characteristics still reflected in another branch of the language family). In Chusole, the vowel length contrast was lost, but formerly long vowels acquired high tone; in words with no long vowels, the first syllable of the word had high tone and the remaining syllables low tone, with pitch tending to drop over the course of the word. I'm not sure how realistic this is, and in the end, I felt as though I had ended up with something not that different from a stress system.

I found your article about tone quite interesting, and I reviewed the earlier Fiat Lingua article by Aidan Aannestad as well. I have not studied any tonal languages myself, and my knowledge of them is fragmentary at best, so any information about them is enlightening.