Proto-Athabaskan is the reconstructed ancestor of the Athabaskan languages .
84-469: The reconstruction of Proto-Athabaskan phonology is still under active debate. This section attempts to summarize the less controversial parts of the Proto-Athabaskan sound system. As with many linguists working on Native American languages , Athabaskanists tend to use an Americanist phonetic notation system rather than IPA. Although some Athabaskanists prefer IPA symbols today, the weight of tradition
168-661: A Dios ) Mexico Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Belize North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region , Nicaragua Honduras ( Atlántida , Colón , Gracias a Dios ) United States Northwest Territories , Canada Mexico Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community , United States Mexico Tone (linguistics) Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what
252-537: A different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin Chinese, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很 [xɤn˨˩˦] ('very') and 好 [xaʊ˨˩˦] ('good') produce
336-739: A failure to distinguish cognation , contact , and coincidence. According to UNESCO , most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (without native speakers but with a community of heritage-language users) or entirely extinct. The most widely spoken Indigenous languages are Southern Quechua (spoken primarily in southern Peru and Bolivia) and Guarani (centered in Paraguay, where it shares national language status with Spanish), with perhaps six or seven million speakers apiece (including many of European descent in
420-490: A huge number of tones as well. The most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not east Asia. Tones are realized as pitch only in a relative sense. "High tone" and "low tone" are only meaningful relative to the speaker's vocal range and in comparing one syllable to the next, rather than as a contrast of absolute pitch such as one finds in music. As a result, when one combines tone with sentence prosody ,
504-454: A hundred or so language families and isolates , as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg 's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and
588-652: A language with five registers. However, the most that are actually used in a language is a tenth of that number. Several Kam–Sui languages of southern China have nine contrastive tones, including contour tones. For example, the Kam language has 9 tones: 3 more-or-less fixed tones (high, mid and low); 4 unidirectional tones (high and low rising, high and low falling); and 2 bidirectional tones (dipping and peaking). This assumes that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. For example, in
672-433: A mid-register tone – the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: the contour remains the same ( ˨˩˦ ) whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words,
756-437: A monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive (phonemic) tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent are word-tone languages. Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example,
840-787: A multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone. Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance (such as changing a verb to a noun or vice versa). Most tonal languages have a combination of register and contour tones. Tone is typical of languages including Kra–Dai , Vietic , Sino-Tibetan , Afroasiatic , Khoisan , Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, such as Cantonese , which produces three varieties of contour tone at three different pitch levels, and
924-488: A number of Mandarin Chinese suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin Chinese) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable: After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like
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#17328445922261008-418: A reconstructable tone system was first proposed by Edward Sapir, although it took around a half-century for his ideas to be realized into a coherent system. Michael Krauss's unpublished manuscript on Athabaskan tone (1979) circulated for decades before being published (2005), and has become the basis for all discussion of Athabaskan tonology. Krauss gives a detailed history of the work on Athabaskan tonology which
1092-525: A rigorous foundation for the position class system that makes up the verb template in Athabaskan languages. He defines a few terms and resurrects others which have since become standard in Athabaskanist literature. Kari (1989) and elsewhere uses + to indicate morpheme boundaries. This convention has been adopted by some Athabaskanists, but many others use the more common – instead. Another innovation from Kari
1176-527: A single tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone. In the most widely spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese , tones are distinguished by their distinctive shape, known as contour , with each tone having a different internal pattern of rising and falling pitch. Many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In
1260-552: A student and consultant of Franz Boas , with whom Sapir described the minimal pair /qáːt/ "crippled" and /qaːt/ " sockeye salmon ". He then encountered tone in Tsuut'ina (Sarcee) and gradually became convinced that Proto-Athabaskan must be reconstructed as a tonal language, although he was concerned by apparently contradictory findings in Gwich'in, Deg Hit'an, and Navajo. His student Fang-Kuei Li , whom Sapir described as "a very able Chinaman", had
1344-484: A surprising gap, but Leer argued against them being distinguished from *š and *ž: "In my reconstruction, PA lacked distinctively reflexed *šʳ and *žʳ as opposed to plain *š and *ž". Although Leer (2005) did not include *ʔ and *h in his list of reconstructed consonants, those two proto-phonemes nevertheless appear in a variety of reconstructions in the same article and hence it can be assumed that they are indeed part of his proto-phoneme inventory. Leer (2005:284) also offered
1428-654: A tone is used to mark aspect . The first work that mentioned this was published in 1986. Example paradigms: Tones are used to differentiate cases as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania ): Certain varieties of Chinese are known to express meaning by means of tone change although further investigations are required. Examples from two Yue dialects spoken in Guangdong Province are shown below. In Taishan , tone change indicates
1512-455: A vowel system consisting of four long or full vowels and three short or reduced vowels which are more centralized. The following table is adapted from Leer 2005 (p. 286) and shows the vowel correspondences between Proto-Athabaskan and the better documented Athabaskan languages. The reconstruction of tone is an issue of major importance in Athabaskan language studies, as well as for the wider historical linguistics field. The possibility of
1596-519: A word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics , but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects. Below
1680-684: Is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine relative-pitch and contour tones, such as many Kru languages and other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa. Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi , for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones. Another difference between tonal languages
1764-701: Is a morphologically conditioned alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy. Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern Southern Min are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes. Examples: 長 tng 'long' vs. tng 'grow'; 斷 tng 'break' vs. tng 'cause to break'. Also, 毒 in Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations: to̍k (entering tone) means 'poison' or 'poisonous', while thāu (departing tone) means 'to kill with poison'. The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka. In East Asia, tone
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#17328445922261848-585: Is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics: Mandarin Chinese , which has five tones , transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels: These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription: These may be combined into a tongue-twister : See also one-syllable article . A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is: A Vietnamese tongue twister: A Cantonese tongue twister: Tone
1932-410: Is an obligatory prefix such that verbs do not exist without the classifier. Its function varies little from language to language, essentially serving as an indicator of (middle) voice and valence for the verb. The name "classifier" is confusing to non-Athabaskanists since it implies a classificatory function that is not obvious. Franz Boas first described it for Tlingit, saying "it is fairly clear that
2016-502: Is briefly summarized here. The early work on Athabaskan languages ignored the existence of phonemic tone. Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice was the first linguist to describe tone for an Athabaskan language, specifically for Carrier, in 1891. Sapir's first fieldwork on Athabaskan languages was with Chasta Costa and Kato, both Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages that lack tone. He encountered tone in Tlingit in 1914 when working with Louis Shotridge ,
2100-688: Is called intonation , but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme . Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in
2184-429: Is crucial to recognize that the symbols conventionally used to represent voiced stops and affricates are actually used in the Athabaskan literature to represent unaspirated stops and affricates in contrast to the aspirated ones. This convention is also found in all Athabaskan orthographies since true voiced stops and affricates are rare in the family, and unknown in the proto-language . The traditional reconstruction of
2268-733: Is debate over the definition of pitch accent and whether a coherent definition is even possible. Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as well as sometimes by changes in phonation. Lexical tone coexists with intonation, with the lexical changes of pitch like waves superimposed on larger swells. For example, Luksaneeyanawin (1993) describes three intonational patterns in Thai: falling (with semantics of "finality, closedness, and definiteness"), rising ("non-finality, openness and non-definiteness") and "convoluted" (contrariness, conflict and emphasis). The phonetic realization of these intonational patterns superimposed on
2352-850: Is highly conserved among members. However, when considered in addition to "simple" tone systems that include only two tones, tone, as a whole, appears to be more labile, appearing several times within Indo-European languages, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families. That may indicate that rather than a trait unique to some language families, tone is a latent feature of most language families that may more easily arise and disappear as languages change over time. A 2015 study by Caleb Everett argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If
2436-586: Is limited to certain regions where the languages are most spoken. Although sometimes enshrined in constitutions as official, the languages may be used infrequently in de facto official use. Examples are Quechua in Peru and Aymara in Bolivia, where in practice, Spanish is dominant in all formal contexts. In the North American Arctic region, Greenland in 2009 elected Kalaallisut as its sole official language. In
2520-423: Is made that stops and affricates are phonologically the same class, although they may be articulated somewhat differently. Leer also adopted the argument advanced by Keren Rice (1997) that there was no need to distinguish between *y and *žʸ. The resulting system is somewhat simpler than the traditional one, with 8 fewer phonemes. The asymmetric lack of retroflex fricatives in the Proto-Athabaskan inventory appears as
2604-476: Is marked and which is the default. In Navajo , for example, syllables have a low tone by default, whereas marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani , however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone. There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables. In many Bantu languages , tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other. In multisyllable words,
Proto-Athabaskan language - Misplaced Pages Continue
2688-489: Is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages , but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian . It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which
2772-482: Is mostly lost. Native American languages The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples . Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct . The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into
2856-408: Is not given in the table above, but is always assumed to be somehow a part of the Proto-Athabaskan inventory. A newer reconstruction by Leer (2005:284) constitutes a significant reorganization of the system. Velars are reinterpreted as palatals , labialized postalveolar affricates are reinterpreted as retroflex consonants, and other labialized consonants are removed. In addition, the clear assertion
2940-651: Is not terribly different from Rice's. Kibrik only gives the zones rather than individual positions where the distinction matters. In addition, Kibrik did not give the domains and boundaries which have been added here for comparison. A major distinction between the Kibrik and Rice versions is in the terminology, with Kibrik's "Standard Average Athabaskan" maintaining much of the traditional Athabaskanist terminology – still widely used – but Rice changing in favor of aspectual descriptions found in wider semantic and typological literature. The terminology in comparison: Kari (1989) offers
3024-549: Is particularly heavy in historical and comparative linguistics, hence the Americanist symbols are still in common use for descriptions of Proto-Athabaskan and in comparisons between members of the family. In the tables in this section, the proto-phonemes are given in their conventional Athabaskanist forms with IPA equivalents following in square brackets. Since transcription practices in Americanist phonetic notation are not formally standardized, there are different symbols in use for
3108-451: Is the "series", which surfaces as the presence or absence of a lateral fricative. The other dimension is the "D-effect", surfacing as the presence or absence of either vocalization or an alveolar stop. Leer (2008:22) gives a newer, more complex reconstruction, which takes into account some rare correspondences with the Eyak yi- prefix. This Eyak form corresponds to a Proto-Athabaskan *nʸə- that
3192-494: Is the case in Punjabi . Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi . In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese , for example, the ngã and sắc tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the nặng and huyền tones are both low-falling, but
3276-483: Is the use of angle brackets to mark epenthetic segments, a convention which is not often used even by Kari himself. The "classifier" is a verb prefix that occurs in all Athabaskan languages as well as the Tlingit and Eyak languages. It is, as Leer (1990:77) puts it, "the hallmark of Na-Dene languages ". The classifier is found in no other language family, although may be present in the Yeniseian family per Vajda (2010). It
3360-417: Is to indicate the valence of the verb ... However, since the name classifier is one of the few grammatical labels sanctioned by common use among Athabaskanists, it is probably not worth the trouble to try to change it. Jeff Leer (1990:93) offers an early reconstruction of the Proto-Athabaskan classifier. It is a portmanteau morpheme with two dimensions that are both phonological and functional. The one dimension
3444-721: Is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms . This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong . However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the Kru languages , a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood , person , and polarity , so that tone may be
Proto-Athabaskan language - Misplaced Pages Continue
3528-469: Is whether the tones apply independently to each syllable or to the word as a whole. In Cantonese , Thai , and Kru languages , each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese , Swedish , Norwegian and many Bantu languages , the contour of each tone operates at the word level. That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3 × 3 × 3 = 27) than
3612-479: The nặng tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the huyền tone is longer and often has breathy voice . In some languages, such as Burmese , pitch and phonation are so closely intertwined that the two are combined in a single phonological system, where neither can be considered without the other. The distinctions of such systems are termed registers . The tone register here should not be confused with register tone described in
3696-513: The Quechuan languages , Aymara , Guarani , and Nahuatl , which had millions of active speakers, to many languages with only several hundred speakers. After pre-Columbian times, several Indigenous creole languages developed in the Americas, based on European, Indigenous and African languages. The European colonizing nations and their successor states had widely varying attitudes towards Native American languages. In Brazil, friars learned and promoted
3780-750: The Tupi language . In many Spanish colonies, Spanish missionaries often learned local languages and culture in order to preach to the natives in their own tongue and relate the Christian message to their Indigenous religions. In the British American colonies, John Eliot of the Massachusetts Bay Colony translated the Bible into the Massachusett language , also called Wampanoag, or Natick (1661–1663); he published
3864-547: The 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador ) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus ). Several Indigenous cultures of the Americas had also developed their own writing systems , the best known being the Maya script . The Indigenous languages of the Americas had widely varying demographics, from
3948-457: The 2010 census. In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic , the most widely spoken Eskaleut language . Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of
4032-484: The Americas by European settlers and administrators, had become the official or national languages of modern nation-states of the Americas. Many Indigenous languages have become critically endangered, but others are vigorous and part of daily life for millions of people. Several Indigenous languages have been given official status in the countries where they occur, such as Guaraní in Paraguay . In other cases official status
4116-1142: The Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages. The first Commissioner of Indigenous languages in Canada is Ronald E. Ignace . Colombia Colombia delegates local Indigenous language recognition to the department level according to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 . Bolivia Corrientes , Argentina Tacuru , Mato Grosso do Sul , Brazil Mercosur Peru (Official Language) Jujuy , Argentina Comunidad Andina Peru (Official Language) Comunidad Andina Belize Mexico Mexico Belize Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto), Mexico Colombia ( Cauca , Nariño , Putumayo ) La Guajira , Colombia Mexico Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (De facto) , Mexico Mexico Honduras ( Gracias
4200-561: The Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench , which employs five level tones and one or two rising tones across levels. Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour ), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone (usually in long vowels). In such systems there
4284-445: The Proto-Athabaskan reconstruction. The following table adapted from Rice & Hargus (2005:9) shows how the syllable codas of Proto-Athabaskan (PA) and the internal reconstruction of Pre-Proto-Athabaskan (PPA) correspond with those of the high-marked and low-marked languages. In the above table, the symbol v represents a monomoraic reduced vowel, the VV represents a bimoraic full vowel, and
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#17328445922264368-509: The Proto-Athabaskan sound system consists of 45 consonants (Cook 1981; Krauss & Golla 1981; Krauss & Leer 1981; Cook & Rice 1989), as detailed in the following table. A peculiar proto-phoneme in Proto-Athabaskan is the sound that Krauss (1976b) represents as *$ , and which Leer (2005:284) has represented as *šʸ though lately he has since returned to *$ (e.g. Leer 2008). This is the phoneme found in Proto-Athabaskan, Proto-Athabaskan–Eyak, and Proto-Na-Dene that occurs in various reflexes of
4452-647: The United States, the Navajo language is the most spoken Native American language, with more than 200,000 speakers in the Southwestern United States . The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo men, who were established as code talkers during World War II. In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America (1997), Lyle Campbell lists several hypotheses for the historical origins of Amerindian languages. Roger Blench (2008) has advocated
4536-530: The V a monomoraic full vowel in a syllable nucleus whose second mora is '. The R represents a sonorant, the S a fricative, the T a stop or affricate, and the ' a glottalization of the preceding segment. Note that nearly all languages that developed tone have also lost syllable-final ejectivity, retaining only the glottalized sonorants and bare glottal stops in that position. (Syllable initial ejective stops and affricates are of course retained.) Because obvious similarities in morphology are prevalent throughout all of
4620-433: The absolute pitch of a high tone at the end of a prosodic unit may be lower than that of a low tone at the beginning of the unit, because of the universal tendency (in both tonal and non-tonal languages) for pitch to decrease with time in a process called downdrift . Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones;
4704-418: The benefit of speaking Mandarin Chinese and hence being well aware of tone. Sapir and Fang-Kuei Li investigated tone in several other Athabaskan languages, including Mattole, Wailaki, Hupa, Dëne Sųłiné (Chipewyan), and Hare. The problem that disturbed Sapir and others was that tone in Athabaskan languages does correspond, but in an unexpected and difficult to explain way. It can be seen in the table above that
4788-485: The case of Guarani). Only half a dozen others have more than a million speakers; these are Aymara of Bolivia and Nahuatl of Mexico, with almost two million each; the Mayan languages Kekchi , Quiché , and Yucatec of Guatemala and Mexico, with about 1 million apiece; and perhaps one or two additional Quechuan languages in Peru and Ecuador. In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in
4872-402: The conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it. The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars. Tone has long been viewed as a phonological system. It was not until recent years that tone
4956-587: The daughter languages or in some cases were lost. This argument was strengthened by data from Eyak which had a system of glottal modifications on vowels that corresponded well to Athabaskan tones, and furthermore by Jeff Leer 's discovery of the Tongass dialect of Tlingit , which had a system closely corresponding that of Eyak. The oppositions in tonal distribution are explained as an ahistorical division in Athabaskan languages whereby each language becomes either "high-marked", "low-marked", or "unmarked" for tone based on
5040-517: The differentiation of tones. Investigations from the 2010s using perceptual experiments seem to suggest phonation counts as a perceptual cue. Many languages use tone in a more limited way. In Japanese , fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch ; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there
5124-470: The distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality but simply have relatively few members, and for some North American tone languages, multiple independent origins are suspected. If generally considering only complex-tone vs. no-tone, it might be concluded that tone is almost always an ancient feature within a language family that
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#17328445922265208-442: The dorsals. In particular, the symbols c, λ, and ƛ are rare in most publications today. The use of the combining comma above as in c̓ has also been completely abandoned in the last few decades in favor of the modifier letter apostrophe as in cʼ. Republication of older materials may preserve older symbols for accuracy, although they are no longer used, e.g. Krauss 2005, which was previously an unpublished manuscript dating from 1979. It
5292-422: The effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing . Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after
5376-600: The first Bible printed in North America, the Eliot Indian Bible . The Europeans also suppressed use of Indigenous languages, establishing their own languages for official communications, destroying texts in other languages, and insisted that Indigenous people learn European languages in schools. As a result, Indigenous languages suffered from cultural suppression and loss of speakers. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, brought to
5460-502: The first person singular pronoun. In Athabaskan languages, it usually has a reflex of /š/, the alveolar fricative, but in Eyak it appears as /x/ and in Tlingit as /χ/. Peculiarly, in Kwalhioqua-Tlatskanai, it seems to have been /x/ in at least some forms of the first-person-subject verb prefix (Krauss 1976b). It does not correspond well with other fricatives, a situation that led Krauss to considering it as unique. This proto-phoneme
5544-440: The five lexical tones of Thai (in citation form) are as follows: With convoluted intonation, it appears that high and falling tone conflate, while the low tone with convoluted intonation has the same contour as rising tone with rising intonation. Languages with simple tone systems or pitch accent may have one or two syllables specified for tone, with the rest of the word taking a default tone. Such languages differ in which tone
5628-615: The languages differ in how their tones correspond: the first three have low tone where the next three have high tone, and vice versa, with the last three lacking tone entirely. This issue puzzled linguists for some time. Both Li and Harry Hoijer both harbored suspicions that Proto-Athabaskan lacked tone entirely, but it took until 1964 when Michael Krauss published a paper in the International Journal of American Linguistics where he argued that Proto-Athabaskan instead had glottalization contrasts which developed independently into tones in
5712-476: The languages in the Athabaskan family, Proto-Athabaskan has an extensive reconstructed proto-morphology. Like all Athabaskan languages, it is morphologically complex. Keren Rice (2000) offers a "Pan-Athabaskan" verb template that characterizes the complexity of verb morphology in the proto-language and the daughter languages. The actual verb template of Proto-Athabaskan has not been reconstructed yet, as noted by Vajda (2010:38). Nonetheless, Rice's generalization of
5796-412: The next section. Gordon and Ladefoged established a continuum of phonation, where several types can be identified. Kuang identified two types of phonation: pitch-dependent and pitch-independent . Contrast of tones has long been thought of as differences in pitch height. However, several studies pointed out that tone is actually multidimensional. Contour, duration, and phonation may all contribute to
5880-418: The only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go". In Yoruba , much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called " talking drums ", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech. Note that tonal languages are not distributed evenly across
5964-407: The original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called floating tones . In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into
6048-457: The phrase 很好 [xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦] ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as [xɤn˨˩˦꜔꜒xaʊ˨˩˦] . Tone sandhi in Sinitic languages can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of
6132-506: The primary function of these elements is a classificatory one" (Boas 1917:28), a not inaccurate statement given that it does enter into the classificatory verb system. Previously Edward Sapir had noted it in his seminal essay on the Na-Dene family, calling it a "'third modal element'" (Sapir 1915:540). He described it as indicating "such notions as transitive, intransitive, and passive" (id.), thus having voice and valency related functions. Once it
6216-611: The same range as non-tonal languages. Instead, the majority of tone languages belong to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Vietic groups, which are then composed by a large majority of tone languages and dominate a single region. Only in limited locations (South Africa, New Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others) do tone languages occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, it may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when one examines
6300-428: The same sounds, a proliferation partly due to changes in typefaces and computing technology. In the following tables, the older symbols are given first with newer symbols following. Not all linguists adopt the newer symbols at once, although there are obvious trends, such as the adoption of belted ɬ instead of barred ł, and the use of digraphs for affricates which is standard today for the laterals but not fully adopted for
6384-432: The term "transitivity indicator" with the gloss abbreviation TI , Keren Rice (2000, 2009) has used "voice/valence prefix" abbreviated V/V , and for Tlingit Constance Naish and Gillian Story (1973:368–378) used "extensor". None of these alternatives has gained acceptance in the Athabaskan community, and Jeff Leer describes this situation: A better term would be something like "valentizers", since their principal function
6468-511: The term includes both inflectional and derivational morphology. Tian described a grammatical tone, the induced creaky tone , in Burmese . Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language of Nigeria is described as distinguishing six surface tone registers. Since tone contours may involve up to two shifts in pitch, there are theoretically 5 × 5 × 5 = 125 distinct tones for
6552-603: The theory of multiple migrations along the Pacific coast of peoples from northeastern Asia, who already spoke diverse languages. These proliferated in the New World. Countries like Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Guyana recognize most Indigenous languages. Bolivia and Venezuela give all Indigenous languages official status. Canada, Argentina, and the U.S. allow provinces and states to decide. Brazil limits recognition to localities. Canada Bill C-91, passed in 2019, supports Indigenous languages through sustainable funding and
6636-406: The tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive. Lexical tones are used to distinguish lexical meanings. Grammatical tones, on the other hand, change the grammatical categories . To some authors,
6720-894: The traditional reckoning, the Kam language has 15 tones, but 6 occur only in syllables closed with the voiceless stop consonants /p/ , /t/ or /k/ and the other 9 occur only in syllables not ending in one of these sounds. Preliminary work on the Wobe language (part of the Wee continuum) of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the Ticuna language of the Amazon and the Chatino languages of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more. The Guere language , Dan language and Mano language of Liberia and Ivory Coast have around 10 tones, give or take. The Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have
6804-466: The verb template based on various languages in the family is a reasonable approximation of what the structure of the Proto-Athabaskan verb might look like. Rice's is probably the newest attempt at a Pan-Athabaskan template, but it is not the only one. Kibrik (1995) and Hoijer (1971) also proposed templates which generalized across a number of Athabaskan languages. Hoijer's proposal is missing several elements which were described in detail later, but Kibrik's
6888-475: The word must take their sandhi form. Taiwanese Southern Min is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam 'salty'; 酸sng 'sour'; 甜tinn 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam 7 sng 7 tinn 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone. Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi . Tone sandhi is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however,
6972-530: Was found to play a role in inflectional morphology . Palancar and Léonard (2016) provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico ), where tones are able to distinguish mood , person , and number : In Iau language (the most tonally complex Lakes Plain language , predominantly monosyllabic), nouns have an inherent tone (e.g. be˧ 'fire' but be˦˧ 'flower'), but verbs don't have any inherent tone. For verbs,
7056-487: Was realized that the Tlingit and Athabaskan morphemes were functionally similar, Boas's name for the Tlingit form was extended to the Athabaskan family. Unfortunately the classifier has only the vague remains of classificatory function in most Athabaskan languages, so in this family the name is opaque. Because of the confusion that occurs from the use of the term "classifier", there have been a number of proposals for replacement terms. Andrej Kibrik (1993, 1996, 2001) has used
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