We took this photo at the end of the day today, to celebrate our first tone rule, resulting in our first rule about how to write tone in this language!

It took us awhile to get there together, but I think it was worth it. We found eight different tone melodies in nouns of form CVCVC (where C is a consonant and V is a vowel). In isolation, each of the melodies falls in the second syllable. The same thing happens when you put a high tone or a low tone before the word.

But when you put either a high or low tone after the word, none of them fall anymore. This happens if you’re adding one or two syllables.

The short version is that the last syllable of the phrase falls. So it looks like the words have a falling tone in isolation, but that’s just because they end the phrase. The same thing with the possessive pronouns (high and low after the noun); they fall because they end the phrase, not (necessarily) because something in those words makes them fall.

So people will certainly be tempted to write this fall, as it is easy to hear. But as it is clearly attached to the phrase (rather than any of these words), it shouldn’t need to be written, except perhaps with a period.

For this interested in what “phrase” means here, so am I.😅 This may be an utterance, a phonological phrase, or a syntactic unit. We’ll need to investigate some longer utterances to find out.

Celebrating Our First Rule of Tone Writing by Kent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International