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Sort of unrelated, but do languages ever lose tones? What other sounds changes happen/would happen in the even a language lost it's tones?

So it entering tone/tone 4 the one that goes up and down?

Wait, so you went to Quito to study a Quechuan language but you did not take the effort to read about this a bit beforehand? Good lord...... Go read Adelaar and Muysken 2004 or something next time you're going to study an Andean language somewhere or one of the massive Aikhenvald tomes on the langu...

I'm want to apply sound changes to my conlang so that tonogenesis can occur. I want to do something more complicated than "losing voiced/unvoiced consonants causes low/high tones." I found an interesting quote: "The classic view for Chinese is that the loss of a final glottal stop yielded the mediev...

Please excuse me if this is already common knowledge, but something that I think needs to be clarified is the amount of dialectal variation in Quechua/Kichwa. I'm bringing this up because I'm under the impression that Quechua is notorious for it's series of ejectives (especially the uvular one). How...

Thanks! I'll start practicing.

Due to a combination of poor hearing, poor audio playback, and lack of training in phonology, I'm having trouble with the lateral affricates.The ones that interest me the most are the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate and the voiceless velar lateral affricate. In particular, the former sounds a l...

Hey everyone, I'm having a debate with a friend about the specific meaning of what it means when a language has case. Her argument is that languages that don't mark for case can still have it because they can still have thematic roles which can have labels like nominative and accusative which you ca...

Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to translate texts from English, which is (mostly?) head initial into my conlang, which is head-final. This is a problem because I don't speak a head-final language, nor do I have a strong enough linguistics background to figure out how all the details work. I tri...

Hello everyone, I'm working on a brief mini-essay for class and we were supposed to interview a bilingual person. I interviewed one of my good friends who is a native speaker of Arabic. He started learning English in school when he was 12, so he speaks English very well, albeit with an accent. Howev...

Although only tangentially related to the initial post, I learned in a world history class that we got Greek texts from the Arabs, so I would not be surprised if we got some Latin texts from them as well.

I finally completed the Main Quest in Morrowind. I really want Skyrim, but because my computer couldn't handle Oblivion, I know it doesn't stand a change against Skyrim...