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Mike S. scripsit: > 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. I agree. However, only four tones drive the tree grammar. The other two exist to mark an NU-clause (a variant of HL) and a "tosspot" compound (a variant of HH). Note that Gua\spi trees are n-ary, not binary. My critique of Gua\spi is at http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/guaspi/old/cowan.msg -- I could dance with you till the cows John Cowan come home. On second thought, I'd http://www.ccil.org/~cowan rather dance with the cows when you cowan@hidden.email come home. --Rufus T. Firefly