8 ms·
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that E
by codevark 8y ago
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.
(Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)
- jumelles 8y agoEnglish doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.
- petecox 8y agoFor those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU
- girzel 8y agoI've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
- schoen 8y agoSomewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p... (that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
- iamshs 8y agoPunjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThere's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.
- schoen 8y agoEnglish does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."
- natch 8y ago>There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThat's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"
- thaumasiotes 8y agoEnglish does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoGiven that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago