Conlanging challenge: toneless Mandarin Chinese

[Otto Kretschmer]

A simple conlanging question/challenge

We know how Chinese tones emerged. Now, what potential phonological processes in Mandarin Chinese might lead to an abandonment of tones without the language becoming oncomprehensible? Has any of you guys played with an idea of a future toneless Sinitic conlang?

[Moose-tache]

Considering Mandarin has already collapsed eight tones into four, it seems that you can just abandon tones with no consequence.

I'm told this has also happened with the Mixtec language, whcih has three tones compared to the several tones of the Oto-Manguean protolanguage, but I don't know anything about it.

[zompist]

Has any of you guys played with an idea of a future toneless Sinitic conlang?

Yep. Though it was intended as a pidgin.

Wikipedia claims that urban Wu can be analyzed as having two tones.

Japanese borrowed huge swaths of Chinese without tones at all. The result is, to be honest, pretty confusing. A single syllable in Mandarin is often ambiguous, so it has to be paired with a synonym to be understandable. In Japanese even a two-character compound can be extremely ambiguous.

[Moose-tache]

This is, however, mitigated by the fact that those lost final consonants are mostly still there in Korean and Japanese, hence guo/guk/koku "country" and guo/gwa/ka "fruit."

[Nortaneous]

A simple conlanging question/challenge

We know how Chinese tones emerged. Now, what potential phonological processes in Mandarin Chinese might lead to an abandonment of tones without the language becoming oncomprehensible? Has any of you guys played with an idea of a future toneless Sinitic conlang?

Wutun is a toneless Mandarin-Amdo mixed language.

[Znex]

The result is, to be honest, pretty confusing. A single syllable in Mandarin is often ambiguous, so it has to be paired with a synonym to be understandable.

To a good extent, this is already happening organically in Mandarin, certainly with nominals and intransitive verbs (plus diminutives and derivatives used commonly in place of the original lemmas).

[zompist]

The result is, to be honest, pretty confusing. A single syllable in Mandarin is often ambiguous, so it has to be paired with a synonym to be understandable.

To a good extent, this is already happening organically in Mandarin, certainly with nominals and intransitive verbs (plus diminutives and derivatives used commonly in place of the original lemmas).

If by "already happening" you mean "happened 800 years ago", I agree. The process is so old that it affects dialects that merge syllables less aggressively, e.g. Cantonese.

[Znex]

If by "already happening" you mean "happened 800 years ago", I agree. The process is so old that it affects dialects that merge syllables less aggressively, e.g. Cantonese.

Ah fair, tbh my knowledge on other modern Chinese varieties is close to null. I just recall that Middle Chinese still kept distinct monosyllables for a long while before the three stop series and codas began to merge with gusto.

[zompist]

If by "already happening" you mean "happened 800 years ago", I agree. The process is so old that it affects dialects that merge syllables less aggressively, e.g. Cantonese.

Ah fair, tbh my knowledge on other modern Chinese varieties is close to null. I just recall that Middle Chinese still kept distinct monosyllables for a long while before the three stop series and codas began to merge with gusto.

No problem... just to add some detail, Middle Chinese is what the language of the rhyme tables is called, and that's 1400 years ago.

Middle Chinese has about 5700 distinct syllables. Mandarin has 1300, Cantonese has 1750. Unsurprisingly, both include compounds for disambiguation-- e.g. Cantonese pahngyauk 'friend', gwokga 'country', louhsyu 'mouse' paralleling Mandarin pengyou, guojia, laoshu and Old Chinese peng, guo, shu. (Too lazy to fix the tones on this computer.)