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I've been reading up on the various ways languages can acquire tone, but haven't found much on how they can lose it. I know a simple tone system like high/neutral can equalize the tones and leave an effect on the vowel, such as length, but what about a complex system like that of Chinese? Or, to put it simply, what kinds of effects can tones, especially contour tones, leave on vowels or consonants when they're lost? Thanks.

IINM the Wu languages have pitch-accent systems that evolved from an earlier (Middle Chinese?) tone system.

EDIT: Or maybe the Bantu languages would be a better place to look, since a lot (if not most) of them have tones but Swahili for example does not.

EDIT2: Not that I've looked into this carefully or anything, but I get the impression that basically what happens is that tones can merge over time, and they can merge so much that eventually you get only a two-way contrast in the end anyway, and then getting to a system that only has stress is just a hop, skip, and jump away from there.

Can't tones become new codas?

Idk, can they? I'm pretty sure codas can become tones, but I don't know whether it works the other way around, too.

I don't know either. I guess that they can, because I saw tones and coda glottals/pharyngeals occur as different realisations of the same thing in various conlangs on the romanisation thread. These glottals/phayngeals could then possibly be coloured by the preceding vowel.

Das Baron wrote:I've been reading up on the various ways languages can acquire tone, but haven't found much on how they can lose it. I know a simple tone system like high/neutral can equalize the tones and leave an effect on the vowel, such as length, but what about a complex system like that of Chinese? Or, to put it simply, what kinds of effects can tones, especially contour tones, leave on vowels or consonants when they're lost? Thanks.

Well, obviously, it can just be lost without any effects. Tones turning into codas seems odd to me, but I think it would be likely for them to turn into different kinds of phonation on vowels, since phenomena like "vocal fry" are often connected to tone levels. For example, Danish stød apparently correlates to differences in pitch accent in some dialects, although I don't know how they are related in terms of historical development.

I don't know if it's attested anywhere, but low tone > creaky voice seems plausible enough to me.

From another tone thread with the same topic (viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33678):

Etherman wrote:As everyone knows, consonants can have an effect on tone (or even create it out of whole cloth). The reverse is true, although much rarer.

Though I don't know of any real world examples, I suppose that tone could effect the development of vowels. Especially since tone is often accompanied by a secondary feature like glottalization or creaky voice.

Isn't creaky voice > vowel + glottal stop also plausible? Then the glottal stop can be coloured by the vowel or other consonants, creating new codas:
/mi˨.mi˨/ > /mḭ.mḭ/ > [miʔ.miʔ] > /mit.mit/
/mi˨.mi˨/ > /mḭ.mḭ/ > [miʔ.miʔ] > /miŋ.mit/
/mi˨.mi˨/ > /mḭ.mḭ/ > [miʔ.miʔ] > /mim.mit/

Tones are typically not codas, but supersegmentals, i.e. features of the vowels/syllables them selves, rather than consonantal components.

vec wrote:Tones are typically not codas, but supersegmentals, i.e. features of the vowels/syllables them selves, rather than consonantal components.

I think the idea is that tone is often associated with phonation, and tone becoming creaky voicing alone could in turn result in syllables with glottal-stop codas.

Middle Chinese tones conditioned whether a consonant is aspirated after devoicing, though the tones aren't really lost.
http://www.frathwiki.com/Chinese_sound_ ... ces#Onsets

I'm reading a draft of an upcoming book on African historica linguistics (by Gert Dimmendal); he reports that the effect of tone on other vowel features is not very well-researched, but that a few cases are known: his example is the Teso-Turkana group of Nilotic, where vowels with complex tone were preserved word-finally vs. vowels with single tone become devoiced.