Re: Has it been tried to represent tones with punctuation ...

On Jun 21, 3:27 am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Atkinson wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
I have a rather dumb question: Why do tones develop in a language
in the first place?

Language change is not teleological; there are no "because"s.

But what is perceived as the sound of a consonant is not a sound in
itself; it's a deformation of the vowel formants, up or down in pitch,
so it is possible for the closure of a final consonant to be lost with
only the pitch change remaining.

Loss of following consonants is only one of the processes of
tonogenesis. According to Moira Yip in her book "Tone", the best-known
source of tonal contrast is a voicing contrast in _preceding_ obstruents
-- voiced consonants tend to lower the pitch of the following vowel, and
this persists when the voice contrast is lost over time (as appears to
have happened in most varieties of Chinese).  Tones can also arise from
loss of other contrasts in onsets (aspiration, glottalization, ...).

Advanced Tongue Root (common in African languages), vowel height, and
other features of vowels have also been associated with the origin of
tones.

The answer(s) to your "rather dumb question" is actually the subject of
active current research by several phonological theorists.  In other
words, it's not simple!

Thanks. I want only to say that I had a certain thought in another
direction. In Chinese one (or sometimes two) ideogram generally
corresponds to one English word. Now, one ideogram has only one
syllable, while in English there are on average several syllables
for one word. This means, in order to express in Chinese the same
information content one desires (while maintaining the numerical
relation above between ideogram and English word) soem means to
extend what is expressible within the framework of a syllable and
tone functions for that (it expands the space to 4 times as large).

Chinese is not written with "ideograms." They do not stand for
"ideas." Every character represents a specific morpheme with a
determinate pronunciation and meaning. (And there is a handful of
bisyllabic morphemes written with two characters.)

Chinese "words" are generally composed of two morphemes and hence
written with two characters.

The Chinese languages with only 4 tones don't have nearly enough
distinctive syllables to match up with the size of a human language's
lexicon -- what is it, maybe 1400 different syllables counting tone?
Chinese languages (such as Cantonese) that haven't lost all their
final consonants -- _and_ have as many as 8 tones -- presumably can do
a bit better with monosyllabic "words."
.

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