Tonal contrasts (was: Abujidas)

The fictitious example looks vaguely familiar - the Mandarin merger of *ka
'song', *kap 'frog', *kat 'cut' and *kak 'each' as modern *ko. (I quote
Bodmer's 'Loom of Language', which is not error-free.) However, I would
make two comments, lest lurkers get the wrong impression:

/r/, /n/ /ng/ (velar nasal) are all allowed as final consonants in Mandarin.

Syllables like "cat" can be contrasted tonally - Thai contrasts three tones
on such syllables, though falling tones on short vowels and high tones on
long vowels are rare.

Richard.

----- Original Message -----
From: "ehlsmith" <ehlsmith@...>
To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 7:56 PM
Subject: [Nostratica] Re: Abujidas


> In case you are not familiar with the concept of a tonal language, it
> is one in which the tone with which a word is spoken is directly
> connected to its meaning. As a hypothetical illustration, suppose
> that in English instead of saying "can", "cap", "car", or "cat" we
> just said "ca" for all four, and depended on the tone to convey
> whether we meant "is able" "small hat", "automobile" or "feline".
> Then English would be a tonal language too.