Questions tagged [tonal-languages]
The tonal-languages tag has no usage guidance.
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Could the precursor to Pre-Proto-Quechua have been a monosyllabic tonal language?
So this has been intriguing me for years:
In 'Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara', Nicholas Emlen mentions, citing Adelaar (1986) ...
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Does a toneless syllable have no f0? How to distinguish a toneless syllable? Please help
If I put speech data on praat, how will I be able to tell which syllable is toneless in a tonal language since the tbu has a vowel already. And the vowel also has got f0.
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Aren't all spoken languages tonal?
From my understanding, a tonal language is when a difference intonation of the word changes its meaning. Now: Italian for example (which I was told is not tonal) differentiates questions from ...
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Is tone actually phonemic in Mandarin?
Mandarin Chinese is often used as an example of a tonal language (one where the meaning of a word depends not only on its articulation but also on its pitch contour).
However, going by what I've read, ...
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Are there any tonal languages with syllable-final consonants that are not unreleased, or even aspirated?
All the tonal languages I have some familiarity with, Mandarin, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Cantonese either lack stop consonants in syllable-final position, or allow only "unreleased" stop ...
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In tonal languages, what is the tone relative to?
According to https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_language
A tone language, or tonal language, is a language in which words can differ in tones (like pitches in music) in addition to consonants and ...
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Can tonal languages be understood when whispered? [duplicate]
I was wondering recently whether the tonal information is lost in tonal languages like Chinese, when it is whispered. Can Chinese still be understood when whispered?
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How do tonal-language speakers use tonality when speaking non-tonal languages?
First post. Wanted to title it "Speaking in tones," but that's not very informative.
Long ago, I learned a little about talking drums and whistle speech as long-range communication tools ...
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What does the absence of a tonal marking on a word in a tonal language imply?
I'm not a linguist and only studying a linguistic subject as an elective so I hope this makes sense:
If I've determined a language is tonal based off the numbers assigned to each word, how am I to ...
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Tonal languages: breath in -or- breath out?
I have a hunch and I'm not sure if it is correct or not: it seems like tonal languages prefer an exhalated pronunciation over an inhalated pronunciation. My original thinking was that it shouldn't ...
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Limitations of the parrot speech?
I was seeing a video of a parrot speaking Korean,
and I thought the way the parrots distinct between aspiration.
As I am not Korean, I really do not know.
What kind of distinctions a parrot can make ...
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How much weight do tones carry in differentiating languages/dialects?
Language and dialect distinction is very simple when everything is phonetically different. Do (read:can) tones carry the same weight?
Let's take one extreme: two languages share the same words & ...
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'Interstitial' tones in Thai
You don't have to listen to authentic Thai for very long to realize that comparatively few words are pronounced with the dictionary tone.
All the learning material out there seems to be focused on ...
user23078
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What might account for different numbers of formants in plots of male and female speakers pronouncing the same vowel?
I have been looking at a Thai vowel in Praat.
I have several exponents from native speakers, though only one of them is male.
The female plots all show four formants. The male plot shows five ...
user23078
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How is "rising tone" the same in all tonal languages?
If we compare two unrelated languages with lexical tone, where both languages have the same number of tonal contrasts, are there any universals/tendencies regarding:
the kinds of tonal contrasts (...
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Tone Languages and distinguishing meaning
I am new to learning all of this and had a couple of questions.
Tone languages use pitch to distinguish words. For example, in Thai
nā with a mid-tone meaning "rice paddy".
nǎ with a rising tone ...
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Non-tonal (and tonal) languages and inflection
I want to know whethere there are any standards that would allow a non-tonal (or tonal) spoken language like English to be augmented with diacritics to denote how the tone varies, as the entire ...
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Which methodology is use for comparative study between two languages?
I want to study between two languages. In that one is classical language and other is tongue language. How can I compare that two category? Which criteria is used for comparative study?
I want to ...
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Is Thai less tonal than Chinese or Vietnamese or Burmese?
I'm curious about the comparative reliance on tonality in Asian languages.
By this I mean not the number of tones, but the frequency of tonal versus non-tonal words in communication. (When I say non-...
user9324
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Difference between pitch and intensity
I would like to understand what is the difference in lignuistic betwen pitch and intensity.
On the picture (taken from native HK speaker), I have a Cantonese sentence.
Nei5 Jiu3 Caa4 Maa3 ?
...
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Are there tonal languages which use a rising intonation for questions?
I know that in the case of Mandarin Chinese questions do not end with any kind of rising tone unless the last morpheme in the sentence happens to have a rising tone.
For questions which don't contain ...
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Term for homophones in tonal languages which share phonemes but have different tones?
In English we have several terms, "homonym", "homophone", and "homograph".
The first one is disliked by linguists as being too vague though might be best used for words with separate etymologies that ...
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Most tones contrasting by pitch and not just contour?
Lately I've been wondering a lot whether or not there's an upper limit on how many contrasting tones a language can have that differ primarily by pitch difference and not so much by the shape or ...
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Non-tonal "isolates" within families of tonal languages
I've put "isolates" in scare quotes because this is probably not a standard meaning for the term "language isolate". But anyway I'm sure it's still abvious what I'm looking for.
I was wondering about ...
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Tonal Language with more than 5 tones
I'm searching for languages which use a lot of different tones. The one with the most tones I found was Thai which has 5 tones. Are their tonal languages with use more distinct tones than thai?
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Are tones "preserved" when borrowing between unrelated tonal languages?
Let's consider just borrowing between unrelated, national/standardized tonal languages, just in case borrowing between related languages might be a special case and borrowing between non standardized ...
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Do all tonal languages have tone sandhi?
Tone sandhi is the process by which the nominal tones of syllables or words change based on the surrounding context.
I know that Mandarin Chinese and Thai have tone sandhi - but is this process ...
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Do native speakers of language with lexical tone have difficulty learning another language with more or different lexical tones?
Have there been any studies done on say Mandarin native speakers who learn as adults other languages which have more lexical tones or which have lexical tones different to Mandarin?
I believe for ...
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How do tones work in music sung in tonal languages, such as Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese?
I have not yet studied tonal languages, so it might be understandable, but when I listen to Chinese music, for example, I'm unable to perceive tones. This makes me think they are partially or ...
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