---In engelang@yahoogroups.com, <and.rosta@...> wrote :
>Good news that a full blown reference grammar is in the works -- needless to say, I hadn't supposed >that the design itself didn't extend beyond what was covered in the primer.
I agree - just recently read the primer, and found it quite interesting. Looking forward to the expanded description.
selpa'i
seladwa@... [engelang], On 11/09/2014 19:20:
>> Since tone contributes to brevity, it is ergonomic, but I'm not
>> sure what set of tone contrasts is optimally ergonomic. I feel sure
>> that those nine are too many.
>
> The new version has 8 tones (one of which isn't actually a tone, so it's
> actually 7). I find them easy enough to distinguish (in theory :P ). I
> agree that 9 was one too many, as the two low tones (one of which I
> deleted) were too easy to confuse. I also changed most of the
> tone-to-POS correspondences.
[...]
> I have a short text in the new book, a translation of a fairytale, and
> it turns out that the Toaq Dzu version is considerably shorter than the
> English, but I don't think that it achieves that by artificial means.
> It's mostly a side-effect of the tones, which save a load of function
> words. Root words are monosyllabic, but compounds can be as long as you
> like.
>As I said in my previous message, I would distinguish between brevity achieved by increasing >paradigmatic phonological contrast and brevity achieved by other means, with the latter more especially >of interest. [ ... ]
Or perhaps brevity achieved by a combination of expanded phonological contrast _and_ other means.
>While the choice of optimal set of paradigmatic phonological contrasts is a pertinent engelang question, >it's not really one where different minds all tend to converge on the same consensus. As I recall, >although in Xorban we sensibly postponed serious consideration of of phonology, our respective views >were similar but different in nontrivial ways (such as the number of vowels). I doubt that on this matter >we can change one another's open minds; I don't think it is daft of you to go for 8 tones; but I myself do >think 8 is too many, and I'm pretty sure that the number of tones favoured by the average loglanger is >only fractionally above 1.
Aside from Toaq Dzu, Guaspi, Livagian and Solresol, I can't think of too many non-artlangs that employ tones (though if there are Chinese conlangers out there, I'd imagine some of them have produced tonal conlangs of one sort or another.
>I myself (who long ago taught English intonation to native and foreign speakers) have to turn my brain up >to max nowadays when analytically recognizing tone, and would not be remotely as good at it as you >seem to be. Does any natlang have as many as 8 contrasting tones? None that I know of (but that >doesn't mean there aren't any).
I think that Cantonese is sometimes analyzed as having 9 tones, though six tones consist of three tones with/without a final stop, if memory serves. There are Central American languages such as the Mixtecan Trique dialects with between seven and ten tones, usually 3-5 level tones and the rest are contours, and the Papuan language Iau has 9 tones (which have aspectual/modal function on verbs and semantic function on nouns, iirc). I'm sure there are a few others about.
>Unsurprisingly, the greater the number of contrasts, the rarer the system. How frequent is it that people >who aren't native speakers of a tone language successfully learn a tone language? How does that >correlate with the complexity of the tone system?
I'd imagine that someone must have done a study on this, but don't know of any off the top of my head.
-Bfowol