You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones when they would be lost on others. — Jane Austin, Persuasion

This post aims to summarize two recent important changes to Toaq’s phonology.

In short, they are:

Syllables can now have a null onset, which is realized as a glottal stop. The pronunciation of the 3rd and 7th tone has been adjusted.

The reason for change #2 is twofold: It is necessary for making change #1 possible without introducing word-boundary ambiguities. Additionally, it fixes a subjective problem I had with the 3rd tone, whose pronunciation I disliked enough that it made me avoid relative clauses. Unlike the 3rd tone of Mandarin Chinese, Toaq’s 3rd tone cannot be turned into a low tone, and that made it unnatural to me. It had to be pronounced very carefully to keep it distinct from either the rising tone or the low tone. The new 3rd tone is much easier to pronounce and easier to distinguish from the other tones.

The following table illustrates the new tone contours. Only the 3rd and 7th tone are different.

1st tone

flat tone 2nd tone

rising tone 3rd tone

rising glottal tone 4th tone

falling tone 5th tone

rising-falling tone 6th tone

low tone 7th tone

low glottal tone

neutral tone

The 7th tone kept its glottal stop but now has a low tone contour. The 3rd tone now also has a glottal stop and its contour is that of the 2nd tone. With these adjustments in place, we gain access to vowel-initial syllables (and words), which means new root forms and more flexibility when borrowing words from other languages. To reflect the new pronunciation of the 3rd tone, the diacritic changes from to .

Examples

ao

a root expressing subjunctive modal necessity, “would” (new root form)

arānē

“to be a spider” (previously harānē)

sa ẻlū chüfāq nủo

“some elephant who is currently asleep” (previously hẻlū chǔfāq)

Pủ dủa jí hóq bũ da.

“I did not know that.” (contour on 7th tone now low instead of rising)