On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 12:13 AM, John Cowan
<cowan@hidden.email> wrote:
Mike S. scripsit:
> LL \ low (grave accent) governs child on right
>
> LH \/ rising (caron) governs no child
>
> HH / high (acute accent) governs child on left
>
> HL /\ falling (circumflex) governs children on left & right
Have you looked at Gua\spi yet? It's the original grammar-by-tones
system:
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/guaspi . The tonal spelling is
irritating, but that's partly because it predates Unicode. I devised
a Unicode spelling which I keep meaning to write down but never do.
I was aware of the existence of Gua\spi before I sketched the above, but while I was sketching it I was reacting entirely to the Fink-Miller system that And had brought up and doing something independent of Gua\spi. I would not be surprised if there were some areas of convergence. I actually intend to circle around and check that out soon, having put some thought into grammar-by-tones recently.
To be honest, when I studied Gua\spi a while back, I was put off a bit by the need to articulate *six* tones. I am probably not as anti-tone as most Westerners; even though they don't come naturally to me, I don't mind putting up with anything up to four, especially if they can be analyzed as underlying LL LH HL HH. Past that, I do think that it gets tricky and that there are some good cross-linguistic reasons to avoid that in auxlangs and loglangs if you are plying your wares to an international audience.
On the other thread I am sure you saw that I actually find simpler tone systems useful e.g. those with only a H/L distinction -- one detail I left out was a marginal third falling (HL) tone when a morpheme ends in a diphthong or long vowel. LH to me is an upstep. That is as complicated a tone system as I prefer in most my language sketches.