Questions tagged [tone]
The phonemic use of pitch.
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397 views
Is there any natural language having minimal pairs over tongue root position?
I am building a conlang, which is very likely going to be an isolating language. As such, I decided to make it a tonal language.
But there is a problem. This language is to be sung very often, so ...
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1answer
90 views
Are there any languages that have tones that shift over vowels in a single syllable?
I am wondering about tones. Specifically, wondering if there are cases where a tone shifts from one vowel to the next, perhaps in some language like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese, if not some African ...
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1answer
1k views
What is "˥˩" in the IPA?
While reading the Wikipedia page on voiced bilabial trill, I came across a transcription in the occurrence section which looks like:
[tʙ̩˥˩]
The word is from Lizu language and means 'bean'. What is ...
0
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1answer
59 views
Resources on stress, tone and pitch evolution
I am interested in the stress, tone and pitch (STP) aspects of historical linguistics. How do phonetic and other types of changes affect STP changes? How do languages end up with entirely different ...
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2answers
147 views
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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1answer
173 views
Number of tones in Cantonese vs. Mandarin and final stops
The emergence of tones in Chinese languages (and actually most tonal languages) is, roughly speaking, due to the loss of final consonnants of syllables at an earlier stage of the language. In ...
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2answers
274 views
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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1answer
50 views
Innovations in speech rhythm and tone
I enjoy language columns, such as Johnson in The Economist, which discuss the evolution of language. But I notice that such columns tend to focus only on certain dimensions of language: new words, ...
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160 views
Do any languages use distinct graphemes for vowels with different tones?
As far as I know, most writing systems for tonal languages fall into one of four groups:
The writing system is not phonetic (e.g. Han logograms)
Tone is not generally indicated in writing (e.g. many ...
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1answer
292 views
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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1answer
44 views
(How) can autosegmental theories of tone account for pitch contours with more changes of direction than there are segments?
I had been interested in the idea that tone contours are due to practical limitations in following an underlying target path that is always a straight line, as proposed by Xu. However, this theory ...
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138 views
What is the most archetypal phonemic-tone system?
As user6726 put it in this answer:
There is a misguided tendency to use Chinese as the standard of comparison for tone system, but actually Chinese is the best known but one of the least-...
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Is English tonal for some words, like "permit"?
I have heard the difference between tone and intonation described in the following way:
Tone is when the pitch of a word determines its meaning.
Intonation is when the pitch of a word conveys its ...
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3answers
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Can the IPA represent all languages' tones?
The IPA's current tone system can show five different tone levels, and any contours formed from them.
Is there any language for which this is insufficient? In other words, is there any (known, ...
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1answer
140 views
Will the pitch of a vowel influence its formant values?
Since that the F0 i.e. the pitch is the first harmonic and all formants are the i-th harmonics, is it possible that the formants of a vowel in a high tone are higher than those in a lower tone?
For ...
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1answer
93 views
Simple example of circular tone sandhi?
Are there any particularly simple examples of circular tone sandhi known? For instance, is there an example of a rule in which two tones swap places but the rest are unaffected? Or an example of ...
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1answer
342 views
Whispering in languages heavily dependent on pitch or phonation distinctions
When whispering in English all (segmental) phonological distinctions can – as far as I am aware – still be made, which may be due to redundancy (or simply because voicing is optional). I even ...
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1answer
238 views
How tone shifting actually works - How a speaker navigates the register space
In considering the ways tone might work in languages, I am looking at diagrams of 5 rows (registers I'm guessing) in which you can create tones that shift up and down the registers. Some examples of ...
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2answers
579 views
Example of stress or tone on a consonant
Wondering if there is such thing as stress on a consonant, e.g. t́, ĺ, ḿ, ś, ʃ́... If so, what the example language would be. I haven't seen any on Wikipedia.
Same thing for tone, I haven't seen ...
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321 views
How complex contour tones get in languages
So I have seen a few tonal languages, such as Thai, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese:
I'm not too familiar with which other languages have tonal features. But I'm wondering if there are any ...
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1answer
548 views
Understanding 5-tone register systems
After reading through the Tone Wikipedia page, I get the gist of it. Basically there are register tone systems (like Bantu languages) and contour tone systems (like Mandarin Chinese). In contour tone ...
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1answer
351 views
Most complex examples of tones in tonal languages
Wondering what the most complex examples are of tonal languages, and what its features are. In Chinese there are 4 or 5 tones, but they are relatively simple (contour changes, move up, down, down then ...
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591 views
Types of Sound Variations (Like Accents and Tones) in Languages
So in Spanish and other languages there are accents like:
café
tú
And in Chinese there are tone shifts as in this graphic:
The tones are accounted for in English / Romanization by adding accent ...
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1answer
87 views
What impact does it bring if the tone values of a tone language are generally lowered?
Tones in a tone language have values marked by 1 to 5. If a sound change happens by which tone values become lowered in some cases, e.g. the standard value of a tone in Mandarin is 214, while the ...
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1answer
166 views
What’s a good example a language phenomena in which f0 is NOT correlated to pitch?
It’s standard doctrine that “pitch is perceived f0”, and that f0 is phonetic and corresponds to pitch which is phonological ... no problem there. (Even if this is a simplification)
But I wonder if ...
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173 views
high tone retention
Is high tone retention typologically true? When one of the two adjacent vowels at a word boundary undergoes deletion, one of the two tones also undergoes deletion. And it is said that high tone is ...
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2k views
How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Among historically low income/education groups in the US and in my native Mexico City, "ghetto talk" is heavy on the use of pitch to convey meaning. I've always attributed this to people compensating ...
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1answer
179 views
Tone associated to segments other than vowels
Are there languages in which lexical tone can associate to semivowels or glottal stops, or does tone ALWAYS associate only to vowels when it is realized in a spoken word?
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98 views
Are there necessary and sufficient features for categorizing tone using only f0?
Imagine i gave you recordings of a few syllables in an unknown language, but told you that there are H and L tones in that language. In that case you could probably distinguish H from the L syllables ...
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1answer
265 views
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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2answers
479 views
The accentual (Tone) system of Ancient Greek
This question is presented with the help of the sources from Wikipedia.
The Greek diacritics were introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium, which became standard in the Middle Ages. My question is: ...
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1answer
87 views
What kind of experimental procedures can be used to determine tone values (1-5)?
Unlike vowel formant frequencies, tones are trickier to determine, since the F0 of a TBU may depend on a lot of factors, such as the speaker's age, gender, mood, etc. Thus, it's quite often the case ...
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5k views
What is the difference between formant frequencies and pitch frequency?
Sorry if this question sounds a bit basic. I haven’t had a solid grounding in phonology/phonetics yet so I am a bit confused about these concepts.
We’re trying to build a model which studies certain ...
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67 views
What's a simple example of natural classes of tone contours?
I recently learned (in this forum) that natural classes of tones are posited based on the tendency of members of those classes to act together (that is, I suppose, to have the same effect based on a ...
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1answer
62 views
Representing tone in feature matrices
I’m studying feature geometry in my intro to phono course, and we’re looking at tone. One topic which I have trouble getting my head around is the “tonal motivation” for autosegmental phonology; ...
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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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1answer
65 views
How did Goldsmith account for phenomena otherwise explicable with the OCP?
How did Goldsmith account for the OCP using Autosegmental Phonology?
I suppose he couldn't accept it because
OCP prohibits identical segments (which don't exist, as such in Autosegmental Phonology)...
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1answer
92 views
Transcriptions of Mandarin Chinese into writing systems other than Latin, Arabic and Cyrillic?
I was wondering if Standard Chinese has been transliterated (either officially or unofficially) into writing systems other than the Latin (Pinyin, Wade-Giles), Arabic (Xiao'erjing) or Cyrillic (Dungan ...
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1answer
212 views
In what tonal language is tone uncontroversially suprasegmental and not segmental?
So, it recently came to my attention that Chinese tone is not necessary a suprasegmental feature like I assumed. It seems that some claim it can be analyzed as being subsegmental.
If I am interested ...
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1answer
5k views
How are Tone and Intonation languages different acoustically?
On what aspects Tonal languages differ from Intonation languages when analyzing them acoustically?
On intonation and tone: Jones (1960) - "the variations which take place in the pitch of the ...
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1answer
409 views
What is Fall-plus-Rise (phonetics)?
1) Is it a tone?
2) How do you pronounce it? How it would look like in the intonogram?
3) Is it the same thing as Divided (Extended) Fall-Rise? Are there any differences?
4) Is this tone used for a ...
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1answer
165 views
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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2answers
285 views
Can you put tone on any syllable?
I notice that Mandarin has a very simple inventory of sounds and set of possible combinations, whereas some of the languages I'm familiar with which permit more consonant clusters and other ...
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2answers
261 views
Chinese 3rd tone: cross-linguistic comparison
I'm wondering about the rate of occurence of complex tone contours like the Mandarin Chinese third tone, the falling-rising tone. By "complex" I mean that its contour isn't simply a rising, falling, ...
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1answer
1k views
What is autosegmental phonology?
I am an armchair music theorist and trying to read about John Goldsmith's theory of autosegmental phonology.
Can someone summarize the basic principles behind his theory for a linguistic layman?
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1answer
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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-...
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4answers
641 views
Are there documented languages that evolved from tonal to nontonal?
There is a theory about tonogenesis for the Chinese language, thus Chinese had once a more complex syllable-structure and no tones. In the course of time, the syllable structure became less complex ...
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1answer
686 views
What are examples of Haudricourt's tonogenesis in Chinese?
As far as I know, tonogenesis occurs when consonants merge. The merging of initial consonants results in register tones and the merging of final consonants results in contour tones.
What are concrete ...
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1answer
349 views
On Lao triphthongs / tones / orthography
Information on the Lao language is a bit patchy, especially when you start getting a little deeper and find gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions in and between sources on the Internet.
Lao vowel ...
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How many different distinctive sounds can an average human make? [closed]
If we wanted to create an all new alphabet composed of as much letters as possible, with each letter corresponding to one distinctive sound. What's the maximum amount of letters we could have?
Oh and ...
