Difference between revisions of "Talk:Akachenti"

Revision as of 20:34, 25 September 2018

9/25/18

Notes

Lianamir (talk) 14:00, 25 September 2018 (CDT)

Akachenti

Akachenti appears to be a register-tone language with breathy-low, glottalic-high, and plain-mid registers.

Vowel Raising

1. patient markers experience vowel-shift in certain environments, likely triggered by some consonant distinction loss
2. patient markers lost their consonants, leaving behind subparadigms with vowel-shifted patient markers
3. high tone blocking rule arose
4. paradigms where it operated merged accented and unaccented forms
5. vowel-shifted markers were then generalised to all positions next to low-tone vowels, to reintroduce the contrast

Compare all diphthong locations to voicing/register of onset consonants. Transitioning between registers can cause perception of a glide and break the vowel. Diphthongized vowels contrasting with pure vowels may lose the register distinction.

Something notable here:

• a -> e = raised vowel
• o -> u = raised vowel
• i -> i /= raised vowel and i -> e = lowered vowel

Which is probably why it's rarely indicated and the e sounds have probably merged. In short, you can't raise higher than i.

possible template before synthesis

[ topic / question particle ] + [ recipient (dative / benefactive) / addressee (imperative) ] + [ patient ] + [ inflected verb ] + [ agent ]

General

lost onset consonants:

• voiced -> low tone
• murmured -> low tone
• aspirated -> high tone
• voiceless -> high tone
• nasal -> ? tone/raised vowel

lost coda consonants:

• glottal stop -> high/rising
• fricative -> low/falling
• murmured -> high tone

It has long been recognized that only an extremely limited set of postvocalic consonants contribute directly to pitch generation, specifically the postvocalic consonants that involve a distinctive laryngeal adjustment—glottal stops and -h.

Khmer devoiced initial voiced stops and transferred the distinction to the vowels instead: tense/high and lax/low. This is a classic sound change split and there had to be something that triggered a vowel split on the patientive "affix" in Akachenti.

Degree of breathiness is variable, with bilabial and forward consonants producing more breathiness and also lower/more open vowels will tend toward more breathiness than close ones.

In diphthongization:

1. high lax vowels and low tense vowels tend to remain stable
2. tenseness produces lowered onsets in high vowels
3. laxness produces raised onset in low vowels
4. mid vowels may participate in either pattern

vowel length

"Not too surprisingly, when the tense-voiced vowels are shorter, the tenseness is often derived historically from a final glottal stop."

vowel quality

"The literature documents two correlations between voice quality and vowel quality, one universally attested and the other more marginally attested. The most accurate statement of these correlations is found in Bradley (1982:120), who describes the vowels deriving from the older voiced and, as is obvious from the modern phonetics, breathy-voiced register as “higher” and“more fronted”, while describing the vowels deriving from the older creaky-voiced register as“lower” and “more backed”. The correlation between voice quality and vowel height, that is, F1 is widely attested and uncontroversial: countless scholars have observed that breathy-voiced vowels tend to be relatively higher (e.g., /i/ versus /I/), while tense-voiced vowels tend to be relatively lower (Henderson (1952, 1977), Huffman (1976), Denning (1989), Hombert (1978), Bradley (1982) and so on). The correlation of tenseness (laryngealization) with lower vowels is seen in Mpi, a language in the Lolo-Burmese branch of Tibeto-Burman; Denning (1989:29-33) examined the two-way phonation contrast between modal and tense voice in Mpi and noted that Mpi the tense-voiced vowels showed lowered vowels, that is, the tense-voiced vowels had a higher F1.

"The second correlation, between voice quality and vowel fronting, that is F2, is neither as often observed, nor as clearly designated: in Bradley’s terms (1982:120), breathy-voiced vowels tend to be more backed, while tense-voiced vowels tend to front. Henderson (1952, 1977:259) describes what seems to be the same correlation but in different terms; the breathy-voiced vowels have a “tendency to diphthongize”, while the tense-voiced vowels have a “tendency to centralize”.23 Similar tendencies observed by other authors (e.g. Huffman 1976) tend to parallel either Bradley’s or Henderson’s characterization." - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3880/a6d440431413675afbdf2d37243e291a0f77.pdf

Huffman (1976), Registrogenesis

• Stage 1: onset distinction, same vowel
• Stage 2: onset distinction, redundant register split
• Stage 3: optional onset distinction, distinctive registers
• Stage 4: full loss of onset distinction

Comments on Conlang Group

Comment Link

So watched a vid yesterday here: David Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention, Episode 27: The Evolution of Tone.

It gave me some direction I think I can actually work with to figure out how Akachenti got it’s tonal accents and possibly enough to backtrack how those standalone pronouns reduced down to the pronominals. In short, breathiness leads to low tone and tense consonants (frequently including glottals) lead to high tone, which definitely correlates with what Akachenti has going.

Also potentially helpful was his video on vowel quality change, which should help me figure out how the high vs. low vowels figure into the tonal accent as well (because they do).

I might actually start conlanging again after a massive block on that front, so looking forward to revisiting Akachenti now.

Today's Reading/Resources

• Vietnamese and tonogenesis: revising the model and the analysis
• Monosyllabicization: patterns of evolution in Asian languages
• Registrogenesis in Khmer: A phonetic account
• THE HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF KRIANG, A KATUIC LANGUAGE
• VOWEL HEIGHT AND REGISTER ASSIGNMENT IN KATUIC
• Stages of Tonogenesis: Evidence from Modern Burmese
• THE PHONETICS OF ATHABASKAN TONOGENESIS
• Sonorant-conditioned mid vowel lowering in Turkish
• VOICING AND VOWEL RAISING IN SUNDANESE - immediate download
• A vowel height split explained: Compensatory listening and speaker control

Backreading

Vowel Raising/Lowering in Akachenti

Tbh, I haven't figured out whether vowel raising or lowering is involved because of stress being retracted and glottalized, which is likely to cause vowel-lowering (and i/e/a/u followed by lowering is attested in an excellent natlang example), but then i/e/a/o would let the e displace to let a rise and split and send e into the i region, which could explain ae / e / i showing weird overlaps in their histories. But I have figured out that it's one of them and that figuring out diachronic prosody is my answer to most problems pronoun.

Right now, I'm thinking those elided consonants were possibly uvular, as that's in keeping with the general phonology pattern, the k that shows up in the agentive suffix used with short-fixed-vowel-final verbs, and with vowel lowering, but if vowel-raising turns out the better analysis (in keeping with primary person markers being the lower versions, not the raised versions), then it's likely something else, like a palatal, which is also plausible with the phonology. I'm kind of stuck really digging into both possible avenues into the current vowel set because there's no way I can work with diphthongs in sister languages without nailing down the vowel shifts that led to "modern" Akachenti.

Conversation(s) with Alex Fink

>There's the complication of the associative first person ae / é / ae seeming to be tied to the original 3rd, as evidenced by the vestigial 3rd person e's floating around everywhere and it's continuing to be used as a third person generic when the speaker is "associating" themselves with the generic group referenced. "We should always bide our time." vs. "One should always bide their time."

Hm, the semantic distinctions 1 :: 1.assoc :: 3.generic are very fine, on the grounds of your examples. I think they're easily the sort of thing that could have an ex-nihilo origin. Suppose that for some reason (to be invented) the "associative first person pronoun" used to take third-person agreement, but also that there were two allomorphs of the third-person agreement markers bopping around. One of them might just by some chance (being used in a proverb? phonetic resemblance? etc.) become fixed as the first person associative marker, leaving the other to be the third person marker.

>Third person pronouns don't decline and the associative first pronoun has taken over the regular first altogether.

i.e. free rein to invent the form of the older "regular" first person pronoun. But do try to give it some reason to have been eliminated. Pernicious homophony? A difference of politeness or social connotation?

>Which basically means, you can go from mid tone to low tone, but you can't go from high tone to a low tone. So it just switches to the alternate vowel set. Which may not have made a lot of sense if I thought too much about it, but it felt right and worked beautifully in practice, so I just have to learn to understand prosody now that I want to analyze it. And there is also that the the alternate vowel markers can be used for oblique, noncore arguments but stress is pretty much always accusative and sometimes genitive (head-marked).

Neat. So the vowel-changed versions appear only when the accented versions can't, as a surrogate. That to me says that their distribution will be recent. I.e. originally when the high tone blocking rule arose, the paradigms where it operated just merged accented and unaccented forms. But some subparadigm somewhere had these vowel-shifted patient markers (a vanished consonant could still be the culprit, etc.) and they were then generalised to all positions next to low-tone vowels, to reintroduce the contrast.

My suspect is that some other morph will be involved in the story. For example, if the patientive was marked by vowel raising, maybe the story is that there used to be a backgrounded agent suffix -C which appeared after the object morphs, which at this stage were identical with the subject morphs. Now assume a sound change that raises vowels before -C, and then lose the agent suffix.

Personal Pronominals