Tone
Southern Athabaskan languages are tonal languages. Hoijer and other linguists analyze Southern Athabaskan languages as having 4 tones (using Americanist transcription system):
- high (marked with acute accent ´, Example: á)
- low (marked with grave accent `, Example: à)
- rising (marked with háček ˇ, Example: ǎ)
- falling (marked with circumflex ˆ, Example: â)
Rising and falling tones are less common in the language (often occurring over morpheme boundaries) and often occur on long vowels. Vowels can carry tone as well as syllabic n (Example: ń).
The practical orthography has tried to simplify the Americanist transcription system by representing only high tone with an acute accent while leaving low tone unmarked:
- high tone: á
- low tone: a
So now niziz is written instead of the previous nìzìz.
Additionally, rising tone on long vowels is indicated by an unmarked first vowel and an acute accent on the second, and vice versa for falling tone:
- rising: aá (instead of Americanist: ǎ·)
- falling: áa (instead of Americanist: â·)
Nasal vowels carry tone as well, resulting in a two diacritics on vowels with high tone: ą́ (presenting problems for computerization). Recently, de Reuse (2006) has found that Western Apache also has a mid tone, which he indicates with a macron diacritic ¯, as in ō, ǭ. In Chiricahua, a falling tone can occur on a syllabic n: n̂.
Here are some vowel contrasts involving nasalization, tone, and length from Chiricahua Apache:
- cha̧a̧ 'feces'
- chaa 'beaver'
- shiban 'my buckskin'
- shibán 'my bread'
- bik’ai’ 'his hip'
- bík’ai’ 'his stepmother'
- hah’aał 'you two are going to chew it'
- hah’ał 'you two are chewing it'
Read more about this topic: Southern Athabaskan Languages, Sounds
Famous quotes containing the word tone:
“It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: “Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think,” and the like.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)