English equivalents of tones/pitches.

[Quest]

Tones exist in most languages, they are just used differently. The following audio file should illustrate the point. I post this mainly for Harpoon, but it should be useful to other people who are perplexed by the concept of tones.

Click to listen

[Harpoon]

i dont really get the point and the whole audio file is kind of wierd... but i see your point... i could see how i relate some of the tone prose with certain phrases, like questions, or expecting actions, or completing actions.. it conveys a lot of information... like if someone asked me what dogs do with bones, i'd say "they eat them" but it would be with a response-like tone, kind of rising but not quite... impossible to explain

hmm doesn't Chinese have it like that too? how do they compensate if they don't?

[Quest]

hmm doesn't Chinese have it like that too? how do they compensate if they don't?

Ending particles in Chinese compensate for that.

吗 啦 吧 嘛 呢 喽 了 唷 喔 etc change the overall intonation & meaning of a Chinese sentence.

[Quest]

it conveys a lot of information... like if someone asked me what dogs do with bones, i'd say "they eat them" but it would be with a response-like tone, kind of rising but not quite... impossible to explain

Yes it's not wrong to use the wrong intonation patterns but it would sound odd.

Same with Chinese tones, each character just gets an assigned tone. Speaking with wrong tones can usually be understood but would sound odd. How do people memorize the tones, and speak the right tones without pause? For native speakers, its second nature... For a learner.... I dont know. I guess it's practice+exposure.

[Harpoon]

but in Chinese the tones give meaning... you need them to discriminate between all the syllables, and even then there are many homophone. If you use the wrong tone, you can get a completely different meaning (thats why i still dont understand how music works). Although the stress patterns and intonation in English seems quite hard in itself.

[Quest]

Stand-alone morphemes have no meaning without their corresponding tones.

However, given a context, tones are not always necessary to discern the meaning of a spoken sentence, but not always does not mean never. So, confusions do arise sometimes. In music, meaning takes a secondary role, but its the same concept. When confusions arise you look at the lyric.

Because of the homophones, puns are more readily formed in Chinese.

[beirne]

English equivalents of tones/pitches.

Tones exist in most languages' date=' they are just used differently. The following audio file should illustrate the point. I post this mainly for Harpoon, but it should be useful to other people who are perplexed by the concept of tones.[/quote']

I think the example is misleading. In English tone is partly a function of accent and partly a way to indicate things like whether the sentence is a question, a leading statement, etc. In Chinese the tones are probably replacements for consonants that were dropped so the tones have a phonemic function at the word level. There just isn't anything like that in English. I think if I had understood how Chinese became tonal early in my studies or even beforhand the tones would have made sense to me a lot sooner.

[Alhazred]

Correct me if I am wrong but I think compounds such as blackbird or greenhouse are examples of how tone can influence meaning in English, i.e.: blackbird is pronounced with a stressed first syllable and a less-stressed second syllable, meaning is a bird of that species, whereas in black bird, both words will be stressed exactly the same way and meaning will be a bird that is black. The same goes for greenhouse and green house.

[beirne]

Correct me if I am wrong but I think compounds such as blackbird or greenhouse are examples of how tone can influence meaning in English, i.e.: blackbird is pronounced with a stressed first syllable and a less-stressed second syllable, meaning is a bird of that species, whereas in black bird, both words will be stressed exactly the same way and meaning will be a bird that is black. The same goes for greenhouse and green house.

An interesting example. Stress is different from tone, though. Chinese also has syllable stress while maintaining the tones.

[Harpoon]

An interesting example. Stress is different from tone, though. Chinese also has syllable stress while maintaining the tones.

how do you prononounce an unstressed 4th tone

[anonymoose]

From my experience of listening to native speakers, I think chinese does have overall sentence intonation, as well as syllabic tones. If you listen, for example, to a sentence expressing surprise, the tone will almost certainly be different from a sentence spoken in a neutral tone.

Don't forget that chinese syllabic tones are relative in their intonation. Thus it is possible for the overall pitch of a sentence to go up and down whilst maintaining the appropriate relative intonation between syllables. Does that make sense?

[beirne]

how do you prononounce an unstressed 4th tone

You have the pitch start out high and go down.

[nipponman]

So how do you pronounce a stressed fourth tone?

[beirne]

You have the pitch start out high and go down. You pronounce it with more of an attack and a little bit louder.

[Altair]

Don't forget that chinese syllabic tones are relative in their intonation. Thus it is possible for the overall pitch of a sentence to go up and down whilst maintaining the appropriate relative intonation between syllables. Does that make sense?

This is exactly what linguists have discovered and is the norm for all languages I am aware of. Syllabic tone and sentence "tone" coexist in complex patterns.

From what I have read it also seems clear that syllabic stress is important in Chinese; however, this stress is often not directly perceptible to native speakers and works quite differently from the way stress works in English. It is not a matter of looking up a word in a dictionary and determining which syllable gets stress. The stress is related to sentence rhythms and is rather difficult to describe succinctly. It can sometimes affect sentence structure.

[Harpoon]

Stand-alone morphemes have no meaning without their corresponding tones.

However' date=' given a [b']context[/b], tones are not always necessary to discern the meaning of a spoken sentence, but not always does not mean never. So, confusions do arise sometimes. In music, meaning takes a secondary role, but its the same concept. When confusions arise you look at the lyric.

However, one has to know when there is a confusion and when there isn't. You can sing two perfectly correct phrases or words that have completely different meanings which would have been easily distinguishable by tone differences when talking.

And even two-syllable words have homophones if you take the tones away.. a very poplular song by Jay Chou "An1 Jing4" means "silence" or "calm". With the tones An4 Jing3, it mean's a "concealed mine shaft". Considerably less romantic, imo.

and i recall there are some two-syllabe homonyms, that have the same tones. Of course, it's no different than in English.

[Harpoon]

Ending particles in Chinese compensate for that.

吗 啦 吧 嘛 呢 喽 了 唷 喔 etc change the overall intonation & meaning of a Chinese sentence.

on the topic of these... 吗 (ma5) is said in this audio program to be pronounced with a "high level" tone, but "softer". How does this work?

This also applies to another.. the "ne" (or "na"?) in "ni ne" "how about you?" but i can't find its character

[sfr@rcn.com]

Ne; 呢

Sandra

[shibo77]

English has stress, for example the word "progress" can be a noun when it is "'progress", but a verb when it is "pro'gress".

English also has intonation in a sentence, in a statement it is flat, "You want me to go." and in a question it rises, "Do you want me to go?".

Chinese has intonation in a sentence as well, in a statement it is flat, "你想要我走。" and in a question it rises, "你想要我走吗？"

Chinese also has stress, and the neutral tone marks an unstressed syllable, for example, the word "老师lao3shi1" is a noun meaning teacher, while "老实lao3shi5" is an adjective meaning well-behaved. In the noun "老师lao3shi1", both syllables are of equal stress. In the adjective "老实lao3shi5", the first syllable "老lao3" is stressed, the second syllable "实shi5" is unstressed.

Chinese also has tones, which English doesn't have. They are different pitches for the same vowel. For example, English has (from Oxford dictionary) "father ['fa:ðə®]" which has [a:] stressed and "marsupial [ma:'su;pIəl]" which has [a:] unstressed. Chinese not only has "妈妈 ['ma:ma] (mother)" The first [a:] is stressed, the second [a] is unstressed; But also low level tone "麻[ma35]", rising tone "马[ma214]" and departing tone "骂[ma51]". English doesn't have an equivalent.

It goes from tonal accent to pitch accent to stress accent to intonation within a sentence. Try not to stress neutral tone characters such as "吗ma5" and "呢ne5" and regard them as unstressed syllables in a sentence or word.

I hope this helped.

-Shìbó

[Harpoon]

uh oh.

*sighs*

so the "ma5" and "ne5" are unstressed for questions, so that explains why it is "soft"... but why the 1st tone?

And what do you mean the words rise during questions? I thought you just add the question particle?