tone, accent and word types

2019-01-06T17:04:49Z

Cross-posted from a conlanging forum I'm part of.

Trying to figure out how to note tone changes in my language Nyango* since it's not exactly like Japanese pitch accent but I'm not sure it would be a normal tone language either. (Maybe I'm wrong on that latter point.) There can be up to two "accented" syllables in a word, 1 fall and 1 rise though they don't have to come in that order. I've been denoting a rise with <'> and a fall with <,> after the affected syllables, but I don't know if that's intuitive to just me or if there's a better way. Dunno what I'm going to do to denote contour tones (high+low or low+high on one syllable) when I have them.

Verbs are pretty simple accent wise. They are either unaccented within the root (and have a pitch fall after the root dependent on affixes), or they have a rise and fall dependent on the word's number of syllables. Verb+verb compounds take the accent of the last element. I haven't decided how noun+verb or noun+noun compounds will go, in part because nouns can vary much more in the accented syllables. But "verb-like" adjectives and "noun-like" adjectives can just follow the same rules as verbs and nouns respectively, so that makes things easy there. Adverbs that derive from adjectives might be a little funky, but that just makes things more interesting.

*working name

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Late night conlang musings

2018-12-19T05:27:30Z

Should I simplify things by going with something more like the modern version, or have more fun with the more archaic system?

Probably going archaic since the conlang is based on that version. But I also get annoyed with myself when i can't remember my own rules or keep things tracked...

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princeofdoom

tone, accent and word types

Late night conlang musings