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The Origin of TONAL languages? | ||
Tags: Tonal languages | History | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| GibberMeister Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Scotland Joined 5617 days ago 61 posts - 67 votes  Speaks: Spanish, Catalan, Lowland Scots*, English*, Portuguese | Message 1 of 12 14 February 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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As an avid general language learner I often find myself wondering 'why' to a lot of things. English loss of inflections is perfectly understandable as is the transition from Classical to Vulgar Latin and its subsequent evolution into the Romance languages.
One thing that has intrigued me for a while though is the origin of tonal languages such as Chinese. Is there any current theory or opinion among yourselves as to why tonal languages arose? i.e. Were they initially inflected and lost that inflection or were they always tonal using tone to give grammar and meaning from the start? I've hear people comment on English moving towards Chinese in terms of becoming more analytic, but is there a relation with tonality and the move from synthetic to analytic to tonal? All input appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GibberMeister Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Scotland Joined 5617 days ago 61 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Spanish, Catalan, Lowland Scots*, English*, Portuguese | Message 3 of 12 15 February 2011 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks that was interesting.
My real intrigue though is WHY or HOW the phonemic value of tone arose in the first place though. Loss of inflection led to a gradual need to replace the loss with some other marker....? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GibberMeister Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Scotland Joined 5617 days ago 61 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Spanish, Catalan, Lowland Scots*, English*, Portuguese | Message 4 of 12 15 February 2011 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Actually, forgive the comparison but that Bench language sounded a bit like English played backwards!!!
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| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5562 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 12 31 March 2011 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Haudricourt (1954) wrote a detailed analysis which explained the tonogenesis of
Vietnamese. He believed it was due to the loss of certain initials and finals, which in turn developed into tones. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5051 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 7 of 12 02 April 2011 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
This is widely held by linguists today. Consonants right before and/or right after a vowel affect the pitch of the vowel. This article has some interesting graphs illustrating this: Hombert, Ohala, and Ewan, "Phonetic Explanations for the Development of Tones," Language vol. 55, no. 1 (March 1979), pp. 37-58. An interesting recent example of the emergence of a tone in a language is Cherokee. Cherokee is a tonal language originally spoken in the southern Appalachian mountains in the southeastern United States. In the 1830s most of the Cherokee were forcibly removed to Oklahoma, about 1,000 kilometers to the west. A small population of Cherokees evaded deportation and remains in western North Carolina to the present. The speech of these two Cherokee populations has diverged into distinct but mutually intelligible dialects. Both dialects are tonal, but one difference between them is that in certain words, North Carolina Cherokee has a glottal stop where Oklahoma Cherokee has replaced it with a certain kind of tone. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jsun Groupie Joined 4894 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes | Message 8 of 12 03 April 2011 at 7:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Lhasa Tibetan becomes tonal (contrary to its toneless Amdo Tibetan counterpart) because it
loses consonant clusters and voiced consonants. Chinese language originally have 4 tones (but it is NOT those 4 four tones in Mandarin). However, as voiced consonants disappeared, more tones developed. In many Chinese languages, Voiced Consonants lost ->become voiceless and have tones developed. Edited by jsun on 03 April 2011 at 7:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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