Showing posts with label tone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tone. Show all posts

Thursday, May 28, 2026

Aspects of Tone in Cua (Zachary Wellstood)

Zachary Wellstood's doctoral dissertation (Berkeley) on Cua tone. Below is the eScholarship link to the thesis:

Aspects of Tone in Cua

Abstract (abridged):

This dissertation constitutes the first description and analysis of the tone system of Cua, a highly endangered and underdocumented Kalahari Khoe language of the Tshwa subgroup spoken in southeastern Botswana. This dissertation includes (i) an updated phonological sketch of Cua, including evidence of segmental contrasts and phonotactic constraints, (ii) an empirical overview of Cua’s tonal inventory, tonal phenomena, and tonal morphophonology, (iii) the results of a phonetic study on lexical tone in Cua conducted with 6 Cua speakers, and (iv) a phonological analysis of Cua tone which proposes phonological representations of Cua’s lexical tonal categories and derivations of tonal phenomena noted throughout the preceding chapters.


Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Basic Tonal Analysis in Fieldwork

The purpose of this document is to outline a simple method for figuring out how to transcribe the tones of a tonal language. In the context of an academic Field Methods course, it would be best to wait for week three or four before doing the tonal analysis, since it requires a few hundred recorded words to get off the ground.