- ThoT Database

Tibetan

bod (tibe1272)

Sino-Tibetan (sino1245) > Bodic (bodi1256)

Eurasia

( Tibetan Autonomous Region, China )

L1 speakers: 1200000

L2 speakers: 1000000

Author of the analytical report

Reponsible project member

Dialect that served as a primary data source

Last modified: 2025-03-19 15:12 by vvydrin

2. Prosodic units

TBU

Language has a prosodic foot

Does prosodic foot play a role in establishing boundaries of tonal spans?

3. Tonal inventory

Number of tonal levels

2 (H L)

3 (H M L)

4 (xH H L xL)

5 (xH H M L xL)

6 (xxH xH H L xL xxL)

4 (H M L xL)

4 (xH H M L)

Pitch-related phenomena that serve as tonemic components

D (downstep)

Downdrift

Non-automatic downstep

3.2 Inventory of tonemes

High (Toneme 1)

[ H ]

toneme

Allotones: [ H ] [ H L ]

Criteria:

The Activity Criterion

View details

Low (Toneme 2)

[ L ]

toneme

Allotones: [ L H ] [ L ] [ L H L ]

Criteria:

The Activity Criterion

View details

4. Tonotactics

Minimal tonal span size (in TBUs)

Maximal tonal span size (in TBUs)

Which boundaries can appear inside a tonal span (select all relevant)

none
mora
syllable
foot
morpheme
word

Tonal span prototypically coincides with what unit?

Describe cases when tonal span may be larger than proto unit Describe cases when tonal span may be smaller than proto unit

4.3. Toneless syllables

Superficially toneless syllables (not included in any tonal span)

How toneless syllables are tonalized

Toneless morphemes

Default tonal level that is assigned to toneless units

5. Stress and tone

Culminativity

Obligatority

Stress

Is tonal span position predictable given the position of the stress?

6. Tonal Rules

Tonal spread

tonal spread

In non-verbal disyllabic prosodic words, the toneme of the first (prominent) syllable spreads onto the second syllable: ha [há] ‘breath’ + yang [jàŋ] ‘light’ > ha yang [há.jáŋ] ‘aluminum’ [H há.jaŋ].

7. Grammatical and Lexical Tones

7.1. Grammatical tonal morphemes

Does language have grammatical tonal morphemes?

Does language have floating grammatical tones?

Are there tonal morphemes that combine a segment with a tonal operation outside of the segment?

Are there tonal morphemes that contain more than one toneme?

Estimated number of grammatical tonal morphemes in a language

What kinds of grammatical meanings are expressed with the help of tonal morphemes

inflectional
derivational
syntactic

Grammatical tones are realized on words of the following parts of speech:

noun
verb
adjective
pronoun
numeral
adverb
auxiliary
other

7.3. Lexical tones

Does language have lexical tone?

If lexical tone is not obligatory, what kind of lexemes lack lexical tone? (check all that apply)

grammatical classes of words (e.g. verbs)
words with a similar origin (borrowings, lexifier)
randomly distributed across lexicon

What parts of speech lack lexical tones?

noun
verb
adjective
pronoun
numeral
adverb
auxiliary
other

Does distribution of tonemes depend on word classes?

Miscellaneous

10. Tonal notation in the writing

Are tones marked in the practical orthography of the language?

Analytical report (fulltext)