Summary Details
| Query: |
Contour-tone-only Languages?
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| Author: | Jennifer Alexander | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Phonetics
Phonology |
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| Summary: |
Regarding Query: http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-1236.html#2
Hi all, Thank you so much to those of you who've responded to my query! A summary of the responses follows below. Cheers, Jen Alexander, Northwestern University -------------- Question: Anyone know of any tone languages that have only contour tones (i.e., do not have level tones)? ---Responses--- 1. Larry Hyman, UC Berkeley (personal communication): ''The following have been reported to have only falling and rising: Ray, Punya Sloka. 1967. Dafla phonology and morphology. Anthr. Lx. 9.8, 9-14. Amaya, María Trillos & Roberto Perry Carrasco. 1999. Longitud vocalica del ette toara o chimila. Congreso de Linguistica Amerindia y criolla, 115-123.'' 2. Te-hsin Liu, Paris 8 University: ''There are indeed many Chinese dialects having only contour tones without level tones: Chengtu, Shanghai, Zhenhai, and Wuxi. By contrast, there is no tonal system with only level tones in Chinese.'' 3. Kemp Williams, IBM: ''I'm not sure whether Grebo (Kru, Liberia) uses level tones, but Paul Newman wrote a paper in 1986 arguing that the contour tones in Grebo are underlying and not combinations of level tones. The paper is in K. Bogers, et. al. The Phonological Representation of Suprasegmentals, pp. 175-94, Dordrecht: Foris. Title is 'Contour tones as phonemic primes in Grebo.''' 4. Roger Blench, Mallam Dendo Ltd.: ''I remember an old SIL textbook that claimed that Nung in Vietnam had only contour tones. I can’t find the ref just now but worth checking. This Nung is Tai, but there’s another Sino-Tibetan Nung language, so don’t confuse them. Let me know if this turns out to be true.'' 5. Mike Cahill, SIL International: ''I've been doing some cross-linguistic investigations in recent years too, and I agree, I don't see any ''contour-only'' languages. I believe Ian Maddieson in the World Atlas of Language Structures may have something to say about all this, also in his articles on phonetic universals. I hope you're also aware of Larry Hyman's ''X-Tone'' site, at http://xtone.linguistics.berkeley.edu/. It has only 54 languages (so far!), but is a helpful resource. In one way, we wouldn't even expect to find ''contour-only'' languages, because this would imply a language has a complexity without also making use of simplicity. However, predictions about what is possible in languages have been falsified often enough so I wouldn't stake my reputation on this.'' |
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| LL Issue: | 18.1302 | |
| Date Posted: | 30-Apr-2007 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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