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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: How did Korean lose the tones?
In-Reply-To: tsai@panix.com's message of 10 Jan 1995 23:35:32 -0500
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References: <1995Jan6.215248.9102@galileo.physics.arizona.edu>
	<1995Jan7.221246.28151@midway.uchicago.edu>
	<3esmmn$3o4@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU>
	<1995Jan11.015052.7766@midway.uchicago.edu>
	<3evn6k$fv8@panix3.panix.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 17:29:52 GMT
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In article <3evn6k$fv8@panix3.panix.com> tsai@panix.com (Kevin Tsai) writes:

>In <1995Jan11.015052.7766@midway.uchicago.edu> deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu
>(Daniel von Brighoff) writes:

>>And I explained that Greek was never a tone language, so we can scratch this
>>possible example.

>According to my Attic Greek text, most Greek words have one syllable that
>exhbits a slightly different pitch from the other syllables in the same
>word. There are three: acute (rising), grave (lowering or flat for rising),
>and circumflex (rising and then lowering).

The Greek accent system patterns very much like that of modern Japanese, more
like those dialects in which a fall occurs in a bimoric syllable with the
accent on the first mora.  (It's been a very long time since I last looked, so
I don't remember whether Kyoto or Osaka is an exemplar.)  Recent work on this
issue as reflected in ancient musical notations appears in papers by Devine.

>What does a language have to have in order to be classified tonal?
>(Speculation: perhaps all syllables have to be toned in order for the language
>to be tonal?)

Words have to be distinguished only by a difference in pitch (whether level or
contour) in the majority of the lexicon, with pitch distinctions being wholly
arbitrary, in order for a language to be considered tonal.  Thus, classical
Greek is not tonal because (1) the grave is fully predictable; (2) circumflex
is mostly predictable.  Other pitch languages which are not tonal include
Yoruba and Hausa, with systems which differ greatly from each other and from
the Greek.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
