Tone

From The Toaq Wiki

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 rising tone marks a noun or bound variable. (súq “you”, sa pỏq… póq “some person… that person”)
  3. The rising-creaky tone rising-creaky tone marks the start of a relative clause. ( “which is good”)
  4. The falling tone falling tone marks a verb phrase, or the tail of a serial. (fả “goes”, bũ dẻ “not-beautifully”)
  5. The rising-falling tone rising-falling tone marks the start of a content clause. ( “that it's good”)
  6. The mid-falling tone mid-falling tone marks a preposition. (bìe ní “after that”)
  7. The falling creaky tone 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 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 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 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 rising-creaky tone used to be dipping falling-rising tone (obsolete 3rd tone), and falling creaky tone was just “creaky”.

External links