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Like almost all other Niger–Congo languages, Sesotho is a tonal language, spoken with two basic tones, high (H) and low (L). The Sesotho grammatical tone system (unlike the lexical tone system used in Mandarin, for example) is rather complex and uses a large number of "sandhi" rules. However, the Sesotho system is by no means the most complicated, nor even one of the more complicated. For example, there exist African grammatical tone languages with much more than just two tonemes, and the existence of breathy voiced consonants in the Nguni and other languages greatly complicates their tonology. (In Sesotho there is absolutely no interaction whatsoever between the tonemes and phones of the syllables.) There are also very few instances of "floating" tones, and fewer grammatical constructs indicated purely by a change in tone. (The most common instances of this are rule 1 of the plain copulative and the formation of many positive participial sub-mood clauses.) The rules are generally not very dramatic either, and there is generally a very strong tendency to preserve underlying high tones. (For example, in the Nguni languages the underlying high tone of verb stems, subjectival concords, the noun pre-prefix, and/or objectival concords often shifts several syllables to the right, to the antepenultimate or penultimate syllable.) The tone of a syllable is carried by the vowel, or the nasal, if the nasal is syllabic.〔That is, the tone-bearing unit (TBU) is basically the syllable. In general, to include languages with long vowels, one may say that the TBU of Bantu languages is the mora, and indeed, when dealing with stressed syllables, many descriptions of Sesotho tonology treat the TBU as the mora (that is, a long stressed syllable is analysed as two moras with different tones), but this is really unnecessary.〕 The tone carried by syllabic (and, in Northern Sotho and Setswana, syllabic is left over from the elided vowel. ==Tone types== ''Underlyingly'', each syllable of every morpheme may be described as having one of two tone types:〔One could just as easily say that there are three underlying tone types — high (H (¯ )), low (L (_ )), and null (ø) — and indeed many authors and researchers do. The truth is revealed by noting that all tonal rules work by only manipulating high tones, thus each syllable may be either attached to a high tone (H), or not attached at all (ø). A three tone model would at least require a rule that works exclusively on the L tones.〕 high (H (¯ )) and null (ø). 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: : To form a locative from a noun, one of the possible procedures involves simply suffixing a low tone to the noun. To form the locative meaning "on the grass" one suffixes ''-ng'' to the word ''jwang''‡ (_ ¯ ), giving ''jwanng''‡ (_ ¯ _ ) , with the two last syllabic nasals having contrasting tones. Names, being nouns, frequently have a tonal pattern distinct from the noun: : The Sesotho word for "mother" is ''mme''‡ (_ ¯ ), but a child would call their own mother ''mme''‡ (¯ _ ), using it as a first name. Also, ''ntate''‡ (_ _ ¯ ) means "father", while ''ntate''‡ (_ ¯ ¯ ) might be used by a small child to address their father. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sotho tonology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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