But one feature–whether a language uses pitch as well as vowels and
consonants to convey word meanings–stood apart. Those, such as Chinese,
that encipher meaning in pitch are called “tonal languages”. Those that
do not, like English, are “non-tonal”. And it was versions of Dr
Dediu’s and Dr Ladd’s two microcephaly-related genes that matched the
49 populations along tonal and non-tonal lines.
Language Log (one of the best blogs) has excellent commentary.
see also Gene Expression (one of the best blogs, too)
http://www.gnxp.com/
Not to act like I know more than people who have apparently studied this a lot more than I have, but …
In English you do decipher meaning from pitch. For example, you have to raise the pitch at the end of a statement to turn it into a question. You have to raise the pitch on a part of a statement to shift the focus to it. Example:
“I paid Sally from the credit union account.” (as opposed paying to someone else)
“I paid Sally from the credit union account.” (as opposed to someone else paying)
Why do native English speakers feel the need to put emphasis (*’s, italics, etc.) in their writing? Think about it.
Keeping in tune with person’s post, I’ve read that one of the things people have trouble with when learning Chinese is in fact changing tone properly to account for different emotional intent for example. Tone changes not only for different parts of a word in Chinese, but also in much the same way it changes in English when we ask a question, or are scared or happy and so on. Thus there is an added layer of tonal subtlety that many Chinese as a second language learners never master.
It’s going to be hard to distinguish which way the arrow of correlation is going here since language tends to be passed down within genetic families.
Nathan_Zook and anonymous: That’s fine, until you realize Chinese doesn’t have “words” in the sense that
English does.
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free ringtones
http://www.yourfree-ringtones.com ?free-ringtones”>free ringtones
“We use tone (and usually emphasis) merely to abbreviate.”
No. English uses an alternation in stress – “emphasis” to disitinguish
nouns from verbs in affixed words such as “break up” or “process”
1) Verb: “Do you think they will break UP?”
Noun: “That was a really nasty BREAK up.”
2) Verb: “They will proCESS the length of the nave.”
Noun: “It’s a very involved PROcess.”
and then the noun can be zero-derived inot a verb, but in that case it
retains its noun-like stress pattern:
Verb: “I’ve got to PROcess all these applications in one hour.”
Anyway, at LL they seem to be treating tones in Chinese as if they are all
the same thing. They aren’t. Mandarin has contour tone, which I find
really easy, and Cantonese has pitch tone – three distinct level tones,
high, low and medium, along with some others, while Shanghai and maybe the
other Wu dialects have only two tones, with rules to reduce the tones of
following morphemes in a groups to the contrasting tone. The other languages
in the Sinitic group probably have their own and different arrangements.
If this gentic correlation they discuss is so significant, I wonder how it
applies in West Africa or Meso-America, where tonal languages are also
the norm.
Fuster:
Jim is not confusing tone with context. He’s not even talking about tone in fact, but about stress. Process and process are different depending on the stress. You don’t need context to tell them apart.
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