LINGUIST List 5.484

Wed 27 Apr 1994

Qs: Tone change, Etymology, Singular for plural, Reference

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Directory

1. Enid Wai-Ching Mok, Query:tone change
2. Michael Kac, Etymology of English 'one', 'two', 'three'
3. , Query: Singular for Plural in any language
4. David E Newton, Reference required

Dear netters,
 I'm in desperate need of help from some tone experts on the following
issues:
 1. Has anyone proposed some kind of a hierarchy for tones or tone
 languages?
 2. Is anyone aware of any discussion of interaction between vowels
 and tone or stress and tone in the literature?
 3. Is "tone neutralizaton" found in languages or dialects other than
 Beijing Mandarin?
 4. Where and how is "tone reduction" defined in the literature?
 5. Would a change from a contour tone to a level tone be considered
 a "reduction" phenomenon? And what about from low to high?
 I would be grateful if someone could direct me to some references
addressing any of the above questions or give me examples of tone reduction
from the languages they've worked on or are familiar with.

 Thanks in advance.

Enid Mok
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, HI 96822

This week's New York Times Magazine contains an Endpaper by
Bruce Handy, a senior editor at TIME, in which he claims that the
English words 'one', 'two' and 'three' are believed by some
linguists to derive from first, second and third person pronouns in
PIE. This seemed very odd to me, but then I'm not an Indo-
Europeanist. Would anyone care to comment?

Michael Kac

I recall often coming across descriptions of languages where
plural marking is not obligatory and so you get the apparently
singular forms used for the plural. Southern Paiute is a good
example. However, I cannot find in anything I have readily
available a good example of a sentence in which both overtly
plural and singular (i.e. number-neutral) pronouns are used
to refer to the same plural entity. Anybody?

I've got hold of an article by J Ellis, entitled "General Linguistics
and Comparative Philology", which runs from page 134-174.

However, I've got no other information about it at all. Can anyone
help fill in the missing gaps. I think it's *fairly* old...

Cheers

David E Newton
Department of Linguistics
University of Edinburgh

denling.ed.ac.uk