tone

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by biTsar, Jun 16, 2014.

  1. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    How does tone work in song ? Does tone still convey meaning in song or is that chore left mainly to context ? I don't study Thai and in Thai songs my untrained ears do not hear the tones that are obvious in normal speech. It appears to me Thai words mainly match their pitch to the musical notes in Thai songs, perhaps with the rising or falling aspect preserved. But my ears are tin, please tell me how it actually works.

    Am wondering further, can tone be thought of an essential clarifier of meaning which speeds listening comprehension in tonal languages ? This morning I read the Wikipedia page on tone with my decaffeinated mind and noted that Mandarin can be written in pinyin without tone markings, reporters do it, and the Chinese navy has done so. Would this be true for all tonal languages when written ? Or is it because Mandarin has a relatively simple tone system that you can get away with this in hurried narrow written communication ? No mention of the Royal Thai Navy doing anything similar, help me contemplate my naval here.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Although many Chinese characters are stand-alone words (though many do appear only in bound morphemes), a great number of vocabulary items are 2 or 3 characters. You look at the HSK lists to see this. This precisely because Chinese has so few basic syllables (Pinyin table), even when differentiated by tone (multiple characters/syllables with same tone and different in meaning). So you can kind of slough off your tones and still be understood with many multi-character vocabulary items. But you will not be understood enough that it matters, and not because of "bad accent". Over time I have seen many native speakers of Chinese say that songs are not good for teaching yourself Chinese, especially when it comes to Canto-pop. But it has been decades since I actively studied Mandarin so perhaps my opinions on this are not fully correct.

    Edited to add: One other thing worth mentioning is that over time some Chinese dialects/languages have undergone some tone reduction. While Mandarin has 4+neutral, I think Wu/Shanghaiese only has 3. And Cantonese traditionally was held to have has many as 9 tones, but now which have been reduced in practice to 6-7.

    Another thing that occurs to me is that Chinese and other tonal languages are often seen as having a "sing-song" quality due to the tones that distinguish meaning. But perhaps when you actually sing those languages, some of the "sing-song" quality, and thus meaning, is lost.
    Last edited: Jun 16, 2014
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  3. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    Tone is very interesting I think, and something that the people don't think of so much in the foreign languages, but in each language it's different.

    Of course some langauges change the tone for one word then it has another meaning, but in all the languages the intonation is different. Mostly only the tonal languages receive this focus, I suppose because if the tone is different then the word can be a different one, while in the not-tonal ones, the word's meaning woudn't change but it wouldn't sound excalty correct.

    I think if you have some musical training it help. I can play the piano and can hear very, very good, but I find the intonation and stressing extremely difficult in the langauges. I can hear the chords and sing in tune, but with the phrases' intonation and stressing, I can't do this at all. I don't know a langauge in which the tones change in one word, but for sure I'd hear the difference. i think that a word's tone is easier than a phrases one.

    How can you train the phrasal intonation and rhythms?
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  4. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I don't think there is any fixed way. Some tones are identical, some completely different, depending on the song. I think context plays a more important role in figuring out what people are singing in tonal languages. On the other hand, I often have trouble figuring out what people are singing in my L1.

    There are tons of homonyms in Mandarin. They are able to understand pinyin without tones because of context. This is possible as long as you already know the vocabulary. I don't think it has anything to do with the number of tones being low.
  5. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Re naval communications and reporter notes, those are likely to all be brief. Which would in fact provide less context. However in addition to brevity of individual messages/notes, they are probably also using a very limited vocabulary, lessening the potential for confusion.

    Even with context native speakers sometimes still don't understand. I have seen Mandarin speakers trace a character in the air with their fingers. Also, I have heard them say something like (making this up with no tones) "jinlai de jin", to indicate just what "jin" is being used.

    The question is, if you took a moderately long passage of text and read it in a monotone, like a lower flat 1st tone (mid-range level tone in Cantonese), to a native speaker, how much would they understand? I say moderately long because then they wouldn't have time to stop and reason it out before new words were being spoken without not fully hearing those. I don't know the answer to this question BTW, but it seems to me like it would be a good test of issue.
  6. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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  7. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Whut? Tuns ur umpurtunt? Nuxt yu'll bu tullung mu thut yu nud tu gut yur vuwuls rught tu bu undurstud un Unglush!
  8. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    I wrote this yesterday but did not post it:
    Athers hive netud thit yau con ryndamly essagn viwuls en tho wards of Unglish santinces -- I see you've seen this little prank.
  9. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Graceful degradation due to the redundancy in language. It only works up to a point, as with missing tones.
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  10. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

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    Haha, this post reminded me of times in elementary school when some friends and I would speak with every vowel replaced by /u/.
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