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It has non-diphthongic vowel sequences of 3 vowels long (like Japanese aoi); moreover, these are very common.

It is tonal, with a two- or three-tone system (only level tone, not contour tone).

Bonus points for non-pulmonic consonants.

Piraha fits, and I'm thinking there should be plenty of other good examples, but what I'm pulling up doesn't seem to be quite right.

Yoruba?

EDIT: Thismight help

Even two-vowel sequences in hiatus are rare in Yoruba, and I've never seen a single word with three vowels together.

Theta wrote:Even two-vowel sequences in hiatus are rare in Yoruba, and I've never seen a single word with three vowels together.

Don't Polynesian languages tend to string 3+ vowels? I'm just going off assumption.

non-pulmonic consonants and vowel sequences rarely co-occur afaik

japanese itself sort of counts, what with pitch accent. look in south america and maybe the pacific although tone is rare there

Asking for 3-vowel sequences being very common sounds kinda like asking for languages where "the cluster /ɣt/ is very common" or "the syllable /wʌg/ is very common". Do you want a language that looks like keüà aùìmua ɓuíhú fàfàriáú eíéŋ or just one where VVV clusters occur more commonly than the usual "once in a blue moon"?

I'm pretty sure I've seen a Bantu or Sahel-area language that had tone and semi-frequent bisyllabic vowel sequences, but cranking it up to 3 either means asking for a language where null onsets are like a third of all the syllables, or that some specific ones recur morphologically.

Polynesian has the three-vowel sequences but no tone, and Japanese has three vowel sequences, but I'm really looking for something more tonal than a simple pitch-accent system.

Cael wrote:EDIT: Thismight help

Right, that's a good idea. I've never quite figured out how to make WALS dance that way. Simple tone system + simple syllable structure only pulls up 21 languages from the sample, mostly from the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa, and New Guinea.

Nortaneous wrote:non-pulmonic consonants and vowel sequences rarely co-occur afaik

Ja, this seems like a much rarer combination of features than I had expected. What I'm really looking for is the vowel sequences and the tone system. But I wonder if the historical forces that drive towards each of those things are really at odds with each other. I suppose had kind of been thinking that mora-timed languages like Japanese should have more vowel sequences, and so the mora-timed and level-tone languages of Africa would match these features.

But I guess that long vowel sequences and tone systems are doing some of the same work in differentiating words; in Piraha, perhaps both coexist because the consonant system is so spare.

Tropylium wrote:Do you want a language that looks like keüà aùìmua ɓuíhú fàfàriáú eíéŋ or just one where VVV clusters occur more commonly than the usual "once in a blue moon"?

I'm pretty sure I've seen a Bantu or Sahel-area language that had tone and semi-frequent bisyllabic vowel sequences, but cranking it up to 3 either means asking for a language where null onsets are like a third of all the syllables, or that some specific ones recur morphologically.

Is that example a real language?

I was mostly thinking of examples like Piraha "ti gí kapiigaxiítoii hoaí" (as cited on Wikipedia), but perhaps three-vowel sequences are rarer in Piraha than I remember (even if they are more common than once in a blue moon). It seems like two-vowel sequences in Piraha are very common, however, and that would work fine. And I suspect I was mostly thinking something unusual like Piraha, but not Piraha.

Which is always too much to ask for, isn't it.

Gojera wrote:Can you suggest a natlang with this sound system? . . . It has non-diphthongic vowel sequences of 3 vowels long (like Japanese aoi)

I guess the cheeky answer would be a language with triphthongs . . .

Gojera wrote:What I'm really looking for is the vowel sequences and the tone system.

. . . and so, if you want a lot of vowels and tones, then Vietnamese gets you there (but with 5-6ish tones depending on variety). I'm sure some other SEAsian languages do as well.

SE Asian languages don't have vowel sequences spanning multiple syllables, except for Japanese.

Anyway: Fulnio fits the criteria, but doesn't have non-pulmonic consonants. Khoekhoe has two-vowel sequences, but not three-vowel.

Nortaneous wrote:non-pulmonic consonants and vowel sequences rarely co-occur afaik

japanese itself sort of counts, what with pitch accent.

Um no pitch accent sounds nothing like tone and doesn't act the same way. It's more like stress or intonation. (Japanese people are just as baffled by tone as we are)

I'm reminded of a Japanese student of mine who was also studying Chinese, and was practicing Chinese tones while a Chinese student of mine was listening and helping her. She kept messing up the last tone of whatever she said because she kept altering it into question intonation to confirm if she had pronounced the tones right.

How about this :
/li2u7i7e5e5a2/
"You have his shoe(s)."
2SG have 3SG POSS shoe DIM(?)

Since "have" "3SG" "POSS" and "DIM?" in Minnan are all vowels, you can get a lot of vowel sequences.
Not simple tone system though.

svld wrote:How about this :
/liøuɤiɤeɫeɫaø/
"You have his shoe(s)."
2SG have 3SG POSS shoe DIM(?)

Since "have" "3SG" "POSS" and "DIM?" in Minnan are all vowels, you can get a lot of vowel sequences.
Not simple tone system though.

ftfy

I think those digits are tones...

congratulations

you have failed to get the point

Personally, I vastly prefer using numbers for tones than the symbols or the impossible-to-align-properly diacritics.

also qwyne's kinda right i just looked at it and assumed it was x-sampa.

finlay wrote:also qwyne's kinda right i just looked at it and assumed it was x-sampa.

oh

in other words I just reprimanded Qwyne for failing to get a joke that you didn't make

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO LIVE WITH THIS GUILT

HOW AM I

with cheese.