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From: wing@pegasus.com (Wing Ng)
Subject: Re: Tones in Chinese
Organization: Pegasus Information Systems
Message-ID: <Cz1ADt.16J@pegasus.com>
References: <399utk$97c@mother.usf.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 04:13:05 GMT
Lines: 25

In article <399utk$97c@mother.usf.edu>,
Timothy Miller <millert@grad.csee.usf.edu> wrote:
>Well, so one person says that tones in Chinese came from dropped 
>consonants and another suggests that they may not have and that you can't 

That's a theory, but there is no evidence, yet.  The earliest 
reconstruction of Chinese language still had tones.

But the cognate Tibetan language had no tones, say by 100 A.D.,
and was definitely a later development because of dropping of
consonants.

Since both languages supposedly derived from a common Sino-Tibetan
ancestor, it is plausible that early Chinese had no tones either,
only plausible, not necessarily true.

Wing

>figure out what would have caused them.
>
>So, where did the tones come from?
>
>
>#

