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tone, accent and word types
Jan. 6th, 2019 10:02 amCross-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
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
