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Listening (involuntarily) to Japanese anime theme music, the thought occurs: What is the interplay between lyrics and melody, in tonal languanges? RJA | ||
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Just a nit, but Japanese is less of a tone language than Swedish. As for your question, I found this discussion on the Linguist List, which is a good resource in general. Here's a link. | |||
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May I back up a bit? What is a tonal language? How does English compare? | |||
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I don't think it would make any difference in Japanese: in English speech we don't stress 'happy birthday tó you', but it doesn't jar in song. They might spoil the odd subtle pun about bridges and chopsticks, or noses and flowers. My phonology teacher, who knows fluent Cantonese, basically refused to explain when asked, during a class on tones, how they managed. Well, there are various ways of getting around it, is all the answer we got. : ) | |||
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quote: Robert or jheem will certainly know more butI know a little. When we speak (in English) we can subtly alter the meaning of what we say with our intonation, our tone of voice. Try the word "No" - it can, depending on exactly how we say it mean a simple negation of what has gone before, a negation with an element of uncertainty, a question asking if the other person is saying "no", an angry denial etc. In tonal langages - and the only one I have ever tried to learn any words in is Mandarin Chinese - this is a very formailsed system. Chinese has four tones which are necessarilly rather hard to describe in writing. There is a rising tone which is similar to our "question intonation" but is applied to each word, a falling tone which goes the oposite way, a flat tone where the whole syllable is stressed equally and a dipped tone which starts and ends high but dips in the middle. The meaning changes totally depending on the tone For example (I might have this slightly wrong, it's a long time since someone explained it to me) the word "ma" in its four tones means horse, mother, a swear word and a general interogative added to the end of a sentence to turn it into a a question.* The big problem for us is that as our language isn't tonal in this way we aren't used to distinguishing between the sounds and I found that no matter how dilligently the principle was explained to me I could hear no difference between the four tones. * general interogative rather like the German use of "oder.." or the teenage slang use of "innit". Every silver lining has a cloud. Read all about my travels around the world here. Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog. [This message was edited by BobHale on Sat Feb 14th, 2004 at 5:26.] | |||
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A tone language or tonal language uses pitch as an intrinsic part of the meaning. A classic example is Mandarin, in which [yi-] means 'one', [yi'] means 'move', [yi~] means 'chair', and [yi`] means 'translate': the four tones being respectively high level, low-to-high, mid-low-then-high, and abrupt high-to-low. Many East Asian languages are like this: Cantonese, Thai, Vietnames; so are many African and many Central American languages. Often they have more complicated systems, such as high level, mid level, and low level, high falling and mid falling: so it's not just the pitch pattern but the pitch itself, relative to the speaker's starting point. In some languages the absolute pitches gradually run down over the course of the phrase. Japanese is much simpler. It has one syllable in a phrase with high pitch, and there are simple rules to determine whether nearby syllables are high or low. With a small number of words (as hasi 'bridge' or 'chopstick') it makes a difference. (Pipped by BobHale! The question particle [ma] is untoned, showing another possibility.) | |||
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Just adding a bit more to the explanations given by aput and BobHale. Tone languages (like Mandarin, (4 or 5 tones), Cantonese (6 or 7), Na Diné (aka Navajo, 4), or Hmong (8)) use tone phonemically (i.e., to distinguish between lexical items (words). It is argued that Proto-Indo-European was a tone language. Lithuanian is still one today. Classical Greek and Vedic Sanskrit were tone languages also. In English we use tone (e.g., rising tone at the end of an interrogative sentence) not to make a difference between words, but to add pragamatic (rhetorical) information to a sentence. We mark this in written texts with punctuation and other cues like using italics. (Think of all the different ways you can say "You may be right.") What we in English (and many other languages) use is called stress accent. Tone is also called pitch accent. Also, in Mandarin, syllables can change tone when placed next to one another. Two third tone (falling rising) syllables next to one another cause the first third-tone syllable to use the second tone. (This is a common phenomenon in other tone languages and is called tone sandhi.) Swedish has two tones. | |||
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quote: This is of course a variation in meaning by varying stress rather than tone but the principle is similar. Actually a rather good example cropped up this week in a discussion on the APS board which I shall quote here. Look at the sentence I didn't say she stole my money. Depending on which word we stress when we say it this has seven different possible meanings. Someone else said it. You say I said it but I'm contradicting you. I thought it. I said someone else stole my money. I said she took my money but it wasn't stealing. I said she stole someone else's money. I said she stole something belonging to me but it wasn't money. There isn't an easy way to express the difference in writing other than from context or by typographical devices such as itallics or bold face. Every silver lining has a cloud. Read all about my travels around the world here. Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog. | |||
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quote: Yes, I didn't give a very good example. Actually, in my example other things come into play, mainly (as you indicate) stress, but also elongating the /e/ in 'may', or fiddling with the juncture/pause between words, ('maybe' vs 'may be'). I still think you can put a rising tone on the 'may' with a facial expression (squinting?) to give it some different-than-the-default meaning. But you do see tone in a sentence like: "She ate the strawberries." Again with a rising tone at the end of the sentence to put doubt on whether it was strawbs she ate. You can pronounce it both ways with the same stress pattern. Compare this with a pronunciation where the initail syllable of 'strawberries' is unusally stressed. "She ate the strawberries." As in "She ate the strawberries, not the blueberries." But, yes, stress is more commonly used this way in English. | |||
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Ma-ma MA! mah-a duh Tah-ma ma? (Mandarin Chinese) "Does mother curse the horse's marijuana?" | |||
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When I (oh so briefly) studied Japanese, I was taught that the length of a sound also affected the meaning of a word. Is this a part of tonality? Classic example was the the difference between 'biru' (building) and 'biiru' (beer--OMG, I said something about beer: I should be taken out and shot!). Those spelling differences are of course, the English alphabet spelling of words one learns at first. | |||
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Not connected, not in Japanese anyway. Vowels can be long or short: a short vowel has one mora, a long vowel has two. The accent on a Japanese word can occur on any mora. So theoretically biiru can be bíiru, biíru, biirú, or unaccented biiru, each of which would have a different phonetic realization. (I don't know which it actually is.) | |||
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Interesting discussion! Thanks Bob, Jheem and aput for the explanations. I am not sure if this is related or what may be the cause of this, but I had an interesting experience in my undergraduate school. I was taking an acting class where we were to act as if we were speaking another language. Almost every student used an Asian language for his/her presentation to the class. The professor said this is very common. Could it be related to the tones---or just coincidental? | |||
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