Tone
This page has been updated for Toaq Delta. See Gamma:Tone for the Toaq Gamma version.
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 has mostly grammatical tone: when you change the tone of a word, its grammatical function changes (for example (de) “is beautiful” → (dê) “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”.
Toaq has a little bit of lexical tone, too, limited to speech act particles: (da) and (dâ) are two different lexemes.
The four tones
- The falling tone
is used for verbs, predicatizers, and adjectives. ( (fa) “goes”, (kúe gı) “the good book”, (… po káto) “… of the cat”) - The rising tone
is used for nouns, determiners, and pronouns. ( (káto) “the cat”, (sá kato) “some cat(s)”, (jí) “I/me”) - The low glottal tone
is used for complementizers and clause-initiating words. ( (ꝡä gı) “that it’s good”) - The rising-falling tone
is for adverbial adjuncts. ( (fêı) “angrily”, (nîe tíaı) “inside the box”)
Interaction with parts of speech
This table shows how the four tones interact with Toaq's parts of speech:
| Falling tone
|
Rising tone
|
Glottal tone
|
Rising-falling tone
| |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verb |
|
Bound variable | Adjunct | |
| Pronoun | Argument | Incorporated object | ||
| Determiner | Argument | Incorporated object | ||
| Complementizer | Speech act complement | Subclause head | Incorporated object | |
| Interjection | Interjection | Inquiry | Expression of empathy | |
| Speech act particle | Lexical tone (i.e. (da) and (dâ) are simply different lexemes) | |||
| Focus particle | Steals tone from head if possible, otherwise echoes it | |||
| Conjunction | Highest precedence | Default precedence | Second highest precedence | |