Sotho tonology

(The most common instances of this are rule 1 of the plain copulative and the formation of many positive participial sub-mood clauses.)

On the surface, all remaining null tones default to low (the LTA rule below) and the language is therefore spoken with two contrasting tonemes (H and L).

A classic example of a nasal carrying a tone: Names, being nouns, frequently have a tonal pattern distinct from the noun: In speech, the two surface tonemes may be pronounced as one of several allotones due to the influence of surrounding tones and the length of the syllable.

These changes naturally occur due to the way the language is spoken, including the effect of the penultimate lengthening, but ultimately each syllable of every morpheme may be completely described as having only high and low tones.

[3] In this and related articles, the tonemes of a word are delimited with square brackets and the specific (approximate) spoken allotones are between curly braces.

Most of these allotones only appear on the final word in the phrase in moderately slow or emphasised speech.

When not phrase-final, the mid, high-falling, high-mid, low-falling, and extra-low allotones are normally not heard.

Bear in mind that the falling tones only occur on lengthened syllables, and if a word has irregular stress then the falling tones will not appear on the penult (for example, the second form of the first demonstrative pronoun has tonemic pattern [ ¯ ¯ ] which is pronounced { ¯ ＼ } due to the stressed final syllable).

This is a general trend among almost all Bantu languages with (contrastive or stressed) lengthened vowels, though languages with depressor consonants do have audible upward "swoops" on depressing syllable onsets which may be interpreted as rising allotones.

Nouns derived from the verb stem are fossilised with the tones of the simple class 15 infinitive as appears in medial positions without a subject or object.

Adding a verbal suffix (through derivation, not inflexion) creates a new verb stem which falls in the same tone category as the original, and is subject to the same rules.

For example, applying the (present) "Subjunctive Melody" (HL*H) to the H verb stem [bɔnɑ] -bona ('see') and the L verb stem [ʃɛbɑ] -sheba ('look for') results in both [kʼɪʃɛbɛ  tʼɑ'u] ke shebe tau ('so I may look at the lion') and [kʼɪbɔnɛ  tʼɑ'u] ke bone tau ('so I may see the lion') being pronounced with exactly the same tone pattern [ ¯ ¯ ¯ _ ¯ ].

Sesotho is a grammatical tone language; this means that words may be pronounced with varying tonal patterns depending on their particular function in a sentence.

Indeed, the development of autosegmental phonology was largely motivated by the need for a satisfactory theoretical framework to deal with the tonal grammars of Niger–Congo languages.

This article attempts to explain certain aspects of Sesotho tonology in a rule-based autosegmental framework.

The rules presented below are almost exclusively used in constructing the verbal complex as this is the part of speech most radically affected by the tonal grammar.

The following table presents an informal comparison between the tonal processes found in Sesotho and isiZulu (█ = isiZulu, █ = Sesotho): In the table, a process is unbounded if there is no set limit on the number of syllables over which it may occur.

Bounded shift in Sesotho occurs as the cumulative effect of bounded right tone spread (High Tone Doubling) and Left Branch Delinking, while various forms of spreading may occur in isiZulu if the word is very short or has two or more underlying highs.

To construct many verb forms, including many positive indicative tenses without direct objects as well as infinitives, the following rules are applied in order: Note that the three main levels are always applied in this order, though the actual rules contained in the levels will change depending on the parts of speech, verb moods, etc.