KpTroopaFR wrote:Davush wrote:For example, do the acute and grave accents represent high-level and low-level tones? Or do they represent rises and falls? Or something else?
Just like my IPA chart says, they represent high and low tones.
You call that list an IPA chart? I appreciate you using the IPA but a chart also groups phonemes into rows and columns based on phonological features.
Davush wrote:Does the macron only indicate length, or also tone?
Length. But long vowels can't get tones so I consider it as a "tone-like sound", because in music some notes are longer than others.
Now this is highly unnatural: do you really mean to say that your vowels with a rising-falling tone are shorter than long vowels without tone? That is pretty much impossible from an articulatory standpoint.
Further, even your appeal to music (which is not a good idea anyway, since linguistic tone is nit the same thing as musical pitch) falls down: longer notes still have a pitch, the length doesn't somehow prevent the note from having a pitch, which is what you have here.
KpTroopaFR wrote:2. For the tones only affecting the final vowel, well I just thought it was easier to represent, and words have a nice ring to them like that.
At that point you might be better off calling it a pitch-accent language.
3. I consider nasalised vowels as tones because I just thought having vowels with tildes + acute/grace/circumflex accents looked like too much.
Just because it looks like too much on a page and don't like it means you need to find another romanisation, not that nasalosation and tone aren't compatible. E.g. I'd suggest using -n for nasalisation, or use ogoneks like Athabaskan languages, which frequently cooccur with tone-marking accents.
Evynova wrote:I see you're not taking risks with the phonology and tones, they're very basic: a simple voiced-unvoiced distinction and the exact same tone system as Mandarin Chinese. I like the idea of nasal vowels, but is there a particular reason why nasalised /e/ and /u/ become /ɛ̃/ and /ʌ̃/? Everything else is so ordered and symmetrical, why do these 2 particular vowels make an exception?
Actually I'd expect there to be some discrepancy of quality with the nasalised vowels. Vowel systems where there is a nasal vowel for every oral vowel are actually comparatively rare, I find, and ones wheere the quality exactly matches as well are rarer still.
I have two other questions, regarding the tone system. Firstly, why do tones only affect the final vowel of a word? You either use tones on vowels, or you don't at all. What I mean is there is no single language out there that marks tones on specific vowels and not on all, especially not with a contour tone system like the one you chose.
Actually there are, it's just they're frequently called pitch-accent languages. Lhasa Tibetan I think is one which is called tonal and does restrict the domain on tone, though only to the first syllable.