[_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.)

[natch]

Actually your four don't capture my meaning. There is one missing.

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? .. 5. Did HE contráct the disease?

Does that make it more clear? In other words, these sentences show the same "tones" (different from "tone"), but different stress.

You were saying tones are just stress, but they are not. The stress here is different from the tones.

With #3, the stress is on "contract"; with #5, the stress is on "he"; the "tones" (again in quotes because we don't really use that word for it in English, although I'm saying the underlying phenomenon is the same) are the same in both, although the stress is different.

You can change the tones and the stresses independently of each other, and when you change the tones of the syllables, you get different meanings for the words.

[_emacsomancer_]

I think we're using 'stress' and 'tones' to refer to completely different things. I think you're using 'stress' to mean something like what I would call 'focus prosody', and you're using 'tones' to mean what I would call 'stress'. But, in terms of the acoustics, 'focus prosody' is closer to Mandarin lexical tones (though not in function).

[natch]

If your goal is to wow me with linguistic terminology, good job? Whatever. But I think you are trying too hard and don't have the facts on your side.

I continue to believe that the case of say, digest (such as a compilation of summaries) versus digest (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it) is a very similar case compared to 好學 (hǎoxǔe, read as háoxǔe) (of a study topic: easy to learn) versus 好學 (hàoxǔe) (of a person: loves learning).

[_emacsomancer_]

I agree it's similar in the abstract, but the mechanisms involved are a bit different, at least at the phonetic level. The Mandarin cases will involve rising tone, falling tone, etc. - and English does do some of that, but not at the lexical level (e.g. yes/no questions in English involve a rising tone at the end).

[natch]

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying.

You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones).

The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.

[_emacsomancer_]

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

[natch]

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently.

However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just my assertions to yours. So I'll wrap up with a fitting quote from Frederick Jelinek: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up."

[_emacsomancer_]

Yeah, so I work a bit on both sides (though not on sound stuff), on theoretical things and on getting algorithms to do useful things with language, and so (to follow through with the Jelinek quote) I will point out that getting the performance of your speech recogniser to go up doesn't mean that you gain any understanding of the underlying phenomenon.

So Mandarin lexical tone and English lexical stress are quite clearly functionally equivalent in many ways, and I certainly would be unsurprised if an ML algorithm treated them as representationally similar. But that's still different from English stress and Mandarin tone being the same phenomenon in phonetic terms --- again, in terms of the actual acoustic signal.