tones (was Re: Reasons (was [tied] Re: Some thoughts...))

--- Sean Whalen <stlatos@...> wrote:

The rule is that only the first tone of the word
remains. There's analogy with final-tone plurals.

> See some of the derivations I sent for the
> different cases of "sister" and "dog". If swa`fa'r-
> is the underlying stem, gen. affix -a's deletes tone
> to get swa`far- and the toneless a will be affected
> by
> later a-deletion rules. When simplification causes
> only one tone per word: swe'sros. The tone of the
> final syllable is the only tone for kuxva'n-, so:
> kuxvno's. By analogy with words with only final
> tone
> (common), morphemes like -su'/-su (and all
> tone-marked
> plural affixes) are simplified to their most common
> form, thus swesrsu' instead of swe'srsu.

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