Tone

Toaq is a tonal language. It has tones! That is: saying a word with a rising or falling vocal intonation, for example, makes for a difference in meaning.

Function of tones

Toaq's has grammatical tone: when you change the tone of a word, its grammatical function changes (for example dẻ “is beautiful” → dẽ “beautifully”).

(This is in contrast to lexical tone, like in Chinese: there, when you change the tone of a syllable, it becomes a different word (lexeme) entirely. For example 西 xı̄ “west” → 媳 xí “daughter-in-law”.)

Verb tones

Every verb can be "conjugated" into one of six tones, each of which expresses some grammatical function:

1. (see History section for why there is no tone #1)
2. The rising tone marks a noun or bound variable. (súq “you”, sa pỏq… póq “some person… that person”)
3. The rising-creaky tone marks the start of a relative clause. (gï “which is good”)
4. The falling tone marks a verb phrase, or the tail of a serial. (fả “goes”, bũ dẻ “not-beautifully”)
5. The rising-falling tone marks the start of a content clause. (gî “that it's good”)
6. The mid-falling tone marks a preposition. (bìe ní “after that”)
7. The falling creaky tone marks an adverb. (dẽ “beautifully”)

Sometimes people will say “the fifth tone” or “t5” instead of “the rising-falling tone”.

Neutral tone

Particles, on the other hand, are in the neutral tone (aka the 8th tone), which is not really a tone. The only rule is that you don't continue the contour of the previous tone. So, when saying a particle after the falling tone , you should go up in pitch to break the falling contour. This way, the listener can tell the difference between lẻ moq and lẻmoq.

History

There used to be a flat tone , which marked the continuation of a multisyllable word. But now, the tone contour is spread out over the whole word. This was tone #1, but now it is gone. So we start counting from #2, because it would be more confusing to re-number them.

The rising-creaky tone used to be dipping , and was just “creaky”.

External links

• Refgram: symbols and sounds
• Refgram: phonology