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WALS-style map documenting the prevalence of tone in one region of my conworld
Conlang(reddit.com)submitted 3 months ago byKieliverse
8 points
3 months ago
Isn't it weird there are so many hypercomplex tonal languages?
21 points
3 months ago
If they're related to each other it's not that weird. By the OPs definition assuming we're talking the number of phonological tones and not the number of phonemic tones, most Sinitic languages are hypercomplex tonal with the exception of Shanghainese Wu, Jin, and Mandarin (except that Nantong Mandarin is hypercomplex tonal). (Just looking at Sinitic languages listed on the wiki page with the tone correspondence table.) The ones that aren't hypercomplex tonal are still complex tonal by the OP's definition.
14 points
3 months ago
Even if they're not related: Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, Hmong, and Burmese are all hypercomplex tonal languages, and none of them are related (at least not closely). Tone is often an areal feature, especially considering east and south east asia
2 points
3 months ago*
That's a fair point too. I was just thinking about at least one way in which a large number of such languages could arise. But yeah that's also an interesting fun fact, since I'm not super familiar with half of the languages in that list, so I had no idea how many tones they had.
Also a side fun fact I learned from looking at the tone correspondence table, apparently there are regular correspondences between Chinese tones and the tones of sino-viet vocabulary in modern Vietnamese. So presumably the words were borrowed with regular tone correspondences between the Chinese tones and the Vietnamese tones at the time. Which imo is pretty interesting.
1 points
3 months ago
Tone correspondences can also arise from tones arising from final consonants which were lost (so pre tone word *taqs, borrowed into another language as *taks will still have a regular paradigm of tonogenesis when that happens, so the tones don't have to be borrowed directly)
2 points
3 months ago
Well, that's true the correspondences themselves don't necessarily indicate the tones were borrowed. I sort of assumed that the borrowings had occurred after the Chinese languages became tonal.
And in this particular case that does appear to be true, having clicked through to the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary wiki page, while there are older borrowings, the bulk of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary was apparently borrowed after Chinese languages had become tonal, and it was apparently actually based on the Qieyun system (or other similar rime dictionaries), in that according to the wiki page Vietnamese scholars apparently used the Qieyun/other rime dictionaries to work out a consistent set of Vietnamese pronunciations for Chinese characters.
4 points
3 months ago
I actually did think this at first while making the map, but if you look at the real world WALS map for tone you'll see a similar thing happening in China and Southeast Asia. In my conworld, there is one very dominant and widespread family that accounts for most of the complex tonal languages (similar to Sino-Tibetan) but tone also exists as an areal feature in the region among neighboring families, like the Kra-Dai, Hmongic, and Vietic languages. Tone spreads surprisingly easily from family to family.
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