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 |