[codevark]

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.)

[schoen]

English 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_...

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."

[thaumasiotes]

> We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史]

To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.

[schoen]

> is not intelligible when read aloud

In that case I should definitely not use that as an example of this point! Thanks. :-)

[natch]

>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_]

That'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?"

[natch]

No, you’re talking about a different thing.

Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.

But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that you were talking about with your example sentences.

[natch]

Compare:

Did HE contract the disease?

Did he CONTRACT the disease?

In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed.

Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.

[_emacsomancer_]

This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites:

1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?"

2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?"

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the disease, or something else?"

4. Did he CÓNTRACT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got a third party to create the disease, or something else?"

The ALLCAPS is likely focus prosody, but there's still a differenced from 'catching' and 'commissioning' which is usually referred to a difference in the placement of 'stress' within the word - whether it's on the first syllable or the second syllable (in this case). Since English is stress-timed, it also affects vowel quality. But that's rather different from tone. (Or, to abstract away from terminology the difference between English 'cóntract' (commission) and 'contráct' (catch) is different from what goes on in Mandarin with tone distinguishing between lexical items.)

[_emacsomancer_]

Ok, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps.

I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?

[natch]

Yeah, the first. But... you're taking this way too seriously. This isn't even reddit. These are examples that can illuminate for non-Chinese speaking people how tones in words can make a difference to meaning.

[thaumasiotes]

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

[_emacsomancer_]

Given 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]

> Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items,

Well, the three words "I don't know", if fully realized, are only three lexical items.

English has three words that can be spoken without opening your mouth, with the meanings "yes", "no", and "I don't know". Yes and no are conventionally spelled "uh-huh" and "uh-uh", and consist of voicing interrupted by an [h] (in the case of yes) or a glottal stop (in the case of no).

The "I don't know" sequence consists of voicing broken into three tonal segments. It is a single three-syllable lexical item in which every syllable is "mm" (if your mouth is closed) or "uh" (if it's open), but which uses a tone sequence copied from the phrase "I don't know".

It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place.

[natch]

That can be said in many different ways, so it’s not clear what you mean.

[intertextuality]

That has to do with emphasis, not tones, and it's common with noun-verb pairings like that.

None of those turn into completely different words based on which tone you use to pronounce it; a person would still know what you mean based on the sentence context but it would sound off.

[girzel]

I'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]

Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p...

(that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)

[iamshs]

Punjabi 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_]

There's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.

[jumelles]

English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.

[petecox]

For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU