zompist bboard

So I've seen plenty of information about tonogenesis, how tones can arise from the loss of various consonants or by the bleeding effect of things like voicing of nearby consonants. But what sorts of things can happen when tones are lost?

My personal knowledge is really limited to Slavic, where the effects were mostly limited to stress changes in East Slavic (as well as a few vowel changes).

But cross-linguistically, is the loss of a high tone more likely to have some specific impact on the vowel quality or on nearby consonants that a low tone is not? What happens to more complex contours, like falling or rising-falling?




(More specifically, if you want to help, I'm trying to demolish the following tonal system for a conlang, but I'd like to see any ideas/examples people have of tone loss:
1) Even or Slightly Rising
2) Rising-Falling + Pharyngealization
3) Rising-Falling + Long vowel
4) Sharply Falling

2/3 are kind of obvious, I could just lose the tone and keep the secondary properties. But what about 1 and 4?)

There was a thread on this a few weeks ago where most of the people gave disappointing answers, essentially saying that tones don't tend to leave anything behind. I can't seem to find that thread, so presumably it was on C&C Quickies. Maybe someone will have more ideas this time around.

I'm not sure about phonological consequences, but one consequence is that a lot of new words might be coined - diminutives of new homophones, for example.

Soap wrote:There was a thread on this a few weeks ago where most of the people gave disappointing answers, essentially saying that tones don't tend to leave anything behind. I can't seem to find that thread, so presumably it was on C&C Quickies. Maybe someone will have more ideas this time around.

Oh, really? I must've missed it.



Part of the reason I ask is because I've been doing a lot of reading into Ket recently (that's where the above list of tones is from), and it apparently *does* have some weird side-effects associated with its tones. For instance, Tone 4 (sharply falling) induces palatalization of the following consonant. And I have absolutely no idea why.

Mecislau wrote:Part of the reason I ask is because I've been doing a lot of reading into Ket recently (that's where the above list of tones is from), and it apparently *does* have some weird side-effects associated with its tones. For instance, Tone 4 (sharply falling) induces palatalization of the following consonant. And I have absolutely no idea why.

I am not familiar with Ket offhand, but does Ket possibly have any kind of register system where tone is not an independent variable but rather is closely tied to phonation and/or other variables, as is the case in most of Austroasiatic*? If it had a register system, these other variables could have phonological side effects of their own; I would imagine that differences in, say, phonation would be more likely to have phonological side effects than just differences in tone alone.

* aside from leaving only traces behind independent of tone alone in Vietnamese and having been lost in all but the most conservative dialects of Cambodian

It could also have to do with the original, historical source of that tone in Ket--I don't know anything about it's history. I mean for all I know tone 4 arose historically from syllables with coda /j/.

I can't really give a good answer, but one language you might want to look at is Mandarin, which I've heard is in the process of losing a lot of tonal distinction (Bejing dialects only distinguishing tone on a stressed syllable).