Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 June 17

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June 17

Opposite of tonogenesis?

I was recently reading a description of a relatively obscure Southeast Asian hill-tribe language. The author described a complex contour tone system (I think he classified it somewhere in the Tai-Kadai family) for all dialects he encountered except one, which he mentioned in passing, that "had lost all phonemic tones". Thanks to the likes of Haudricourt, Matisoff, etc., we understand the processes of tonogenesis (the development of tonality). Is there a similar word for the loss of tone? Has there been anything published describing the processes by which a (contour) tone language evolves into a non-tonal language. For example, are there regular phonological developments that would arise to distinguish/prevent the unwieldy amount of homophones that could result when a monosyllabic tonal language becomes non-tonal?--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 06:09, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Khmer is a very well-known and well-studied language that has lost tone, so you may find more information on tone loss (the only term I can think for what you're describing) in the published research on that language. According to Khmer language#Phonation and tone, one of the old tones resulted in diphthongization, while the other (another?) didn't, so the diphthongization prevented widespread homophony when tones were lost. There are other methods of avoiding homophony too, such as compounding; a famous example from English is the use of the terms "sewing pin" (or "stick pin") and "writing pen" in the parts of the U.S. where pin and pen are homophones. I bet some languages with tone loss have resorted to that, too. Angr (talk) 09:32, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Khmer happens to be a language with which I am intimately familiar. In fact I wrote the section (and most of the article) you linked above. Khmer was never actually tonal. Like most Mon-Khmer languages, it had a contrast of phonation (for Khmer, breathy voice vs. clear voice). Voiced consonants of Old Khmer merged over time with the unvoiced series as the "voicedness" transferred to the following vowel, manifested as breathy voice with slight diphthongization while the vowels following the original unvoiced initials remained "normal" or "clear". Throughout Middle Khmer, the diphthongization was cemented in place and the breathy voice lost any contrastive significance. My question was specifically about contour tones, excluding voice quality and pitch-accent. I, too, thought of compounding, as well as replacing ambiguities with borrowings from an areal language as possibilities. I'm just curious if an actual process has been observed/described (I can't recall having read anything similar) or is the subject ripe for research/publication?--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 23:19, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Regarding a "word for the loss of tone": Apart from silly suggestions at linguistic fora ("tonogeddon", for example), the only single word I found was "detonematization", apparently coined by Alfons Weidert, but it hasn't gained a lot of traction in scholarly texts as far as I can tell ([1]). Most works (comparative or not) seem to use "tone loss", "loss of tone", "loss of lexical tone", and so forth. ---Sluzzelin talk 11:47, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Request for transcription of Urdu and Hindi

May someone please transcribe the Urdu and Hindi in this sign? File:Digraphia in Hindustani.png

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 12:45, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Here is the Hindi. पार्सल कार्यालय (pārsala kāryālaya) "parcel office". रेल आरक्षण केन्द्र (rēla ārakṣaṇa kēndra) "rail reservation centre". I don't read Urdu well enough to give you a confident transcription however. Maybe somebody else will be able to do that part.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 19:34, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! Annotated the Hindi! WhisperToMe (talk) 00:00, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Is it okay if I get transcriptions of "IInd Class Booking Counter" at File:Jammu_Tawi_to_Delhi_-_Rail_side_views_01.JPG? WhisperToMe (talk) 00:06, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

My knowledge of Arabic scripts is shaky so take this with a grain of salt, but it appears to me that the Urdu consists of English loanwords except that the last word certainly is not centre. —Tamfang (talk) 05:13, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree, but I suspect that the last word actually is "centre". The dot indicates an "n", but if that were initial it would be a tight curve: I think the longer curve is actually 's-n'. Then I think the mark above the final 'r' is the mark (derived from an Arabic 'ṭa') which marks retroflex consonants in Urdu. I confess I can't see a 't' under it, but that may be another example of the same sort of minimising as happens with the 's'. I'm not certain of all this, though. --ColinFine (talk) 08:46, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

That's interesting! I still would like the transcription even if it has loanwords WhisperToMe (talk) 15:40, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I can't see it. The first letter of the word alleged to be ‘Centre’ is clearly nūn. A sīn should have either three peaks (as in ‘Parcel’ and ‘Office’) or a longish sweep (as in the shīn of ‘Reservation’), neither of which is present; followed by at least a token peak for the nūn, which also ain't there. If the teardrop thing is ṭā’, why is it deṭāched from the stroke? —Tamfang (talk) 22:35, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

Article writing

An article on how to make the complex attractive for night tourism.⟨‹›⟩ -- 14:58, 17 June 2014 14.98.33.160

What are you talking about? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:06, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Are you asking for help writing an article on how to make a building complex attractive for night tourism ? If so, take a shot at it, post it here, and we will critique it for you. If you are searching for such an article, then Wikipedia isn't the right place. You might try a Google search. If you want to post an article about that topic, permanently, I suggest WikiHow, which is more for tutorials like that. StuRat (talk) 03:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Post a link to it here, don't paste a whole article to the RD. —Tamfang (talk) 05:08, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

They might not know how to post a link, and we can always put a collapse box around it here. StuRat (talk) 09:41, 18 June 2014 (UTC)