In response to requests I have often got as to how one approaches a tone language, I present a personal view of the three stages involved, starting from scratch and arriving at an analysis: Stage I: Determining the tonal contrasts and their approximate phonetic allotones. Stage II: Discovering any tonal alternations ("morphotonemics").…

In this paper I argue for a property-driven approach to phonological typology. Rather than seeking to classify or label languages, the central goal of phonological typology is to determine how different languages systematize the phonetic substance available to all languages. The paper focuses on a very murky area in phonological typology,…