Azeb Amha - Maarten Mous - Graziano Savà (eds.): Omotic and Cushitic Language Studies: Papers from the Fourth Cushitic Omotic Conference, Leiden 10-12 April 2003

Abstract

Review

The Typology of Tone and Cushitic

“…Others argue for accent: Hudson (1973) for Beja, and Biber (1982) for Somali. And there is a sort of compromise using the "pitch accent" label as proposed by Hyman (1981) for Somali, and Banti (1988) for Oromo and Somali, or for a system which is underlyingly accentual but tonal in realisation, as Pillinger (1988) proposes for Rendille. The properties of Cushitic languages are of interest to the discussion of tone against accent (Hyman 2006) but this discussion does not do justice to the peculiarities that many Cushitic languages share, such as:…”

“…This is one of the rare phonetic studies of a Cushitic language and the issue of stress in addition to tone needs further investigation. Pillinger (1988) analyses Rendille as (i) an accent language, underlyingly admitting that there are nouns in nominative or genitive case without a high tone, and (ii) a tone language at the surface with the typical tone rules such as high spreading, contour simplification, and downstep.…”