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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: How did Korean lose the tones?
Message-ID: <1995Jan12.074651.27450@midway.uchicago.edu>
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References: <3esmmn$3o4@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU> <1995Jan11.015052.7766@midway.uchicago.edu> <3evn6k$fv8@panix3.panix.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 07:46:51 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).
>
>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?)

Unless you consider the so-called "neutral tone" of Mandarin a fifth
tone instead of the absence of tone, this doesn't hold for Mandarin.

Here's what _The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ (not the best
reference but the one I happen to have handy) says (p. 172):

"Tone languages have to be distinguished from _pitch-accent_ languages
(e.g. Swedish, Japanese, Serbo-Croat), in which a particular syllable
in a word is pronounced with a certain tone or "accent."  For examples,
Japanese /sora/ 'sky' has a falling accent on the first syllable, where-
as /kawa/ 'river' has a rising accent on the second.  A language may
also contain minimal pairs that contrast only in word accent."

Therefore, what distinguishes "pitch-accent" from "tone" would seem
to be that pitch-accent languages allow at most one "tone" (i.e. pitch
contour) per _word_ whereas tone languages allow up to one per _sylla-
ble_.  A vague definition, to be sure, but one that allows us to make
a preliminary distinction.

Since Attic Greek only allowed one accent mark per word (rather than
per syllable), it would seem to fall comfortable into the category of
pitch-accent languages.

And as it turns out, Korean does too:  rereading my Ramsey, I see that
he clearly states "Although lexical pitch distinctions disappeared
centuries ago in the Seoul dialect, systems of pitch accent are still
found in Kyeongsang in the Southeast and Hamgyeong in the Northeast."

So, my hunch was on target:  Korean had and has pitch accent like 
Japanese (and Attic Greek) and not tones like Chinese.  If I had 
only read my sources more closely, I could have spared everyone a lot
of confusion.  In my defence, I was misled by the common practice of
calling "tones" in Middle Korean what are actually "distinctive 
pitches." 

I hope this clarifies the matter.


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
