Saturday 15 July 2017

Tone language, na weti?

And Change said "Let the consonants guarding the vowel to the left and the right contribute some of their phonetic features to the vowel in the name of selfless inter segmental love, even if the consonants thereby be themselves diminished and lose some of their own substance. For their decay or loss will be the sacrifice through which Tone will be brought into the world, that linguists in some future time may rejoice (Matisoff 1973a, 73)"

I'm working on a tone language. And as I am trying to write out rules how these tones work in Baa I came across this citation I thought worth sharing with you. 

Most languages of the world are actually tone languages. They use not only consonants and vowels but also tone as a contrastive feature in lexical meaning. Yes, so we all know languages like Chinese are tonal and for me whose native language is not very tonal, Swedish, it just seems like a jungle of impossibilities to understand or learn to even speak a tonal language. (Swedish has accent 1 and accent 2 as they call it. So we would have tonal melodies over words, but not assigned to syllables like in real tone languages.)

As most features in language, there are rules, and also irregularities. Tones can be a lot of fun, that is if you don't have to write a chapter about it and have a consistent analysis all through your grammar. It teaches us some interesting things about human language. And is it difficult? Well, not necessarily more difficult than other features of language. Some say that parents who speak a tonal language can easily understand their toddlers before they can even speak because the first things children learn is what? Melody. Be it intonation, or tone.

In Africa, and I am sure also in other parts of the world, there are drums, so called talking drums that can be used to communicate past far distances. In the past, used during war, announce a visitor, or maybe the birth of a prince. In other parts of the world, people whistle their sentences and the message gets through. 

I should give you a tutorial on Baa tone one day. Right now I'm pondering on how a to describe why a tone spread in one word, a prefix-verb context, and not in a compound noun.  Different rules apply and I need to get them straight. That is if I have got the labeling of melodies clear in the first place. Not to confuse you more I suggest you learn this phrase from Yoruba, another tone language of Nigeria. Want to know the meaning and many other useful phrases in Yoruba? Check the whole youtube video here.