Abesabesi Grammar

2.6.2 Tones

Quality
Draft
Typological Relevance
no figures
Relevance within Language
no figures
The three register tones are marked with the acute accent (high tone) and the grave accent (low tone). The mid tone is unmarked. Nasals and the approximant /j/ in coda position can bear a low tone, which is why they can also have an accent mark. If the coda consonant is unmarked, it means that it bears the same tone as the syllable's nucleus. Syllabic nasals can bear all three tones and are marked in the same way as the vowels. As the grammatical tones described in the previous section and floating tones can cause shifts in the tones of lexical roots and other processes, which cause a labor-intensive and confusing transcription, they are not transcribed. Some examples in the following sections, however, will transcribe grammatical high tones as H when the tone is essential for a construction. As non-automatic downsteps only occur due to deleted vowels or grammatical tones, they do not have to be transcribed. The only exception are the paradigms for interrogative and conditional subject pronouns. These are both transcribed with the grammatical tones and a downwards arrow for a non-automatic downstep to differentiate them from the indicative paradigm. Automatic downsteps are not marked at all.