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Comment by codevark | Hacker News Reader

In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.

(Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)

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English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."

> We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史]

To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.

> is not intelligible when read aloud

In that case I should definitely not use that as an example of this point! Thanks. :-)

>There aren’t pairs...

That is quite a claim.

Off the top of my head:

digest, digest

regress, regress

contract, contract

implant, implant

etc.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

No, you’re talking about a different thing.

Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.

But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that you were talking about with your example sentences.

Compare:

Did HE contract the disease?

Did he CONTRACT the disease?

In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed.

Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.

This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites:

1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?"

2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?"

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the disease, or something else?"

4. Did he CÓNTRACT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got a third party to create the disease, or something else?"

The ALLCAPS is likely focus prosody, but there's still a differenced from 'catching' and 'commissioning' which is usually referred to a difference in the placement of 'stress' within the word - whether it's on the first syllable or the second syllable (in this case). Since English is stress-timed, it also affects vowel quality. But that's rather different from tone. (Or, to abstract away from terminology the difference between English 'cóntract' (commission) and 'contráct' (catch) is different from what goes on in Mandarin with tone distinguishing between lexical items.)

Actually your four don't capture my meaning. There is one missing.

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? .. 5. Did HE contráct the disease?

Does that make it more clear? In other words, these sentences show the same "tones" (different from "tone"), but different stress.

You were saying tones are just stress, but they are not. The stress here is different from the tones.

With #3, the stress is on "contract"; with #5, the stress is on "he"; the "tones" (again in quotes because we don't really use that word for it in English, although I'm saying the underlying phenomenon is the same) are the same in both, although the stress is different.

You can change the tones and the stresses independently of each other, and when you change the tones of the syllables, you get different meanings for the words.

I think we're using 'stress' and 'tones' to refer to completely different things. I think you're using 'stress' to mean something like what I would call 'focus prosody', and you're using 'tones' to mean what I would call 'stress'. But, in terms of the acoustics, 'focus prosody' is closer to Mandarin lexical tones (though not in function).

If your goal is to wow me with linguistic terminology, good job? Whatever. But I think you are trying too hard and don't have the facts on your side.

I continue to believe that the case of say, digest (such as a compilation of summaries) versus digest (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it) is a very similar case compared to 好學 (hǎoxǔe, read as háoxǔe) (of a study topic: easy to learn) versus 好學 (hàoxǔe) (of a person: loves learning).

I agree it's similar in the abstract, but the mechanisms involved are a bit different, at least at the phonetic level. The Mandarin cases will involve rising tone, falling tone, etc. - and English does do some of that, but not at the lexical level (e.g. yes/no questions in English involve a rising tone at the end).

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying.

You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones).

The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently.

However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just my assertions to yours. So I'll wrap up with a fitting quote from Frederick Jelinek: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up."

Yeah, so I work a bit on both sides (though not on sound stuff), on theoretical things and on getting algorithms to do useful things with language, and so (to follow through with the Jelinek quote) I will point out that getting the performance of your speech recogniser to go up doesn't mean that you gain any understanding of the underlying phenomenon.

So Mandarin lexical tone and English lexical stress are quite clearly functionally equivalent in many ways, and I certainly would be unsurprised if an ML algorithm treated them as representationally similar. But that's still different from English stress and Mandarin tone being the same phenomenon in phonetic terms --- again, in terms of the actual acoustic signal.

Again, stress is different. In the contract example the all-caps is the stress. The other part, which we resort to accents to indicate, is what in Chinese is called tone.

Okay - it's confusing because what you're using accents to indicate is usually referred to as 'stress' in English, and what you're using all-caps for is usually 'emphasis' or 'focus prosody' or the like. I'm very interested in the ALLCAPS phenomenon, but I think it's largely irrelevant here (other than being acoustically similar to Mandarin tone).

So, the áccent thing, is acoustically different from Mandarin tone. So, using the digest example:

a. dígest (such as a compilation of summaries)

b. digést (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it)

The (a) one is usually realised as /ˈdaɪdʒɛst/, while the (b) one as /dəˈdʒɛst/. So not only does the first syllable in (a) have a different vowel than in (b), but first syllable in (b) will have a drastically shorter duration than the first syllable of (a). These acoustic correlates in English are very different from what occurs with tone in Mandarin, which doesn't affect syllable duration or vowel quality in the same fashion. You can visualise the acoustic wave-forms of the accent-thing in English and compare it against the acoustic wave-forms of the tone-thing in Mandarin and see that they involve different acoustic properties. (So no need for any linguistic theory etc.)

I guess you’re not well versed with mandarin. Those accents are tone marks, at least in the context of talking about Chinese tones or tones akin to Chinese tones.

But... you introduced the accents first in this conversation! So you get to decide what you meant by them.

I guess we can’t communicate since were using a different language. Learn how pinyin works with tone markers and then we can talk.

Ok, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps.

I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?

Yeah, the first. But... you're taking this way too seriously. This isn't even reddit. These are examples that can illuminate for non-Chinese speaking people how tones in words can make a difference to meaning.

But there are technical differences between stress and tone. Stress does distinguish words in English, but tone doesn't.

Except when it does. I’ve provided examples.

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.

> Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items,

Well, the three words "I don't know", if fully realized, are only three lexical items.

English has three words that can be spoken without opening your mouth, with the meanings "yes", "no", and "I don't know". Yes and no are conventionally spelled "uh-huh" and "uh-uh", and consist of voicing interrupted by an [h] (in the case of yes) or a glottal stop (in the case of no).

The "I don't know" sequence consists of voicing broken into three tonal segments. It is a single three-syllable lexical item in which every syllable is "mm" (if your mouth is closed) or "uh" (if it's open), but which uses a tone sequence copied from the phrase "I don't know".

It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place.

I see what you mean. I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English.

> It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place.

I'm not fully convinced for that. It's a really specialised instance and it's still standing in for a phrase (a whole proposition in fact) rather than a lexical item as such. Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reinterpreting tonal correlates of some other phenomenon, e.g. Punjabi tone as resulting from reinterpretation of aspiration.

> Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reinterpreting tonal correlates of some other phenomenon

I would have said that the "I don't know" sequence matches this description -- it's just the tonal contour of the original phrase, with the other details stripped out. I don't see how that differs from Punjabi syllables preserving their (originally) allophonic tone while losing their (originally) phonemic aspiration, such that the tone becomes phonemic.

> I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English.

Obviously I can't guarantee that, but I think it's pretty likely for several reasons:

- I can't think of anything similar.

- The yes/no question answers (including the "I don't know" sequence) are a clear conceptual group and differ from normal English in a few ways. The "no", "uh-uh", is also (I conjecture) unique, being the only English lexical item to contain a phonemic glottal stop. (Plenty of English words feature an obligatory glottal stop, but that stop is allophonic, as when the /t/ of "kitten" is transformed into a glottal stop by the /n/ that follows it.) It is of interest that the only phonemic glottal stop and the only phonemic tone should occur in these two closely related words. I strongly suspect that this group of answer words has these unusual features because of the constraint that you can pronounce them without opening your mouth.

- It's a single word that contains a lot more information than one English word should. For the Latin word "nescio" to mean "I don't know" is unsurprising; all Latin verbs are marked with subject agreement and in the case of a first person subject that is generally the only subject marking. English subject marking is almost always mandatory. This is just more evidence that the tone sequence is quite different from normal words.

- English has a non-vestigial system of grammatical tone at the sentence level; tonal marking is obligatory for yes/no questions. But sentence-level grammatical tone can't really coexist with lexical tone. So I'd be very surprised to see other instances of lexical tone outside very special cases. (For example, the phrase "I don't know" can't ever be a yes/no question, and so can't conflict with the English interrogative tone.)

> it's just the tonal contour of the original phrase, with the other details stripped out. I don't see how that differs from Punjabi syllables preserving their (originally) allophonic tone while losing their (originally) phonemic aspiration, such that the tone becomes phonemic.

because, as you elaborate, the English example you mention is really isolated - it's not enough to spawn a system of tone. Even in this case (the "I don't know" sequence), the tone isn't really contrastive.

> the phrase "I don't know" can't ever be a yes/no question

Sure it can, though the contexts wouldn't be that frequent. And some speakers have final rising tone even on non-yes/no questions.

> English has a non-vestigial system of grammatical tone at the sentence level

And of course there's more than just question-associated tone, there's also focus-associated tonal prosody.

> Even in this case (the "I don't know" sequence), the tone isn't really contrastive.

It's not contrastive in that there is no minimal pair that would demonstrate it. But good luck being understood if you don't produce it correctly. The lesson I would draw here is more "minimal pairs aren't sufficient to demonstrate every phoneme" than "it's not a phoneme until a minimal pair exists".

> the English example you mention is really isolated - it's not enough to spawn a system of tone

I didn't claim and don't believe that English is developing lexical tones. But I do believe that the development of lexical tone in this single unusual word is fundamentally similar to the larger-scale development of tone in other languages, and that the still-obvious relationship between the phrase and the tone sequence makes this a good example to help English speakers understand how it can happen.

> And of course there's more than just question-associated tone, there's also focus-associated tonal prosody.

Very true, but much harder to describe.

> The lesson I would draw here is more "minimal pairs aren't sufficient to demonstrate every phoneme" than "it's not a phoneme until a minimal pair exists".

Perhaps. (Minimal pairs are, of course, simply a diagnostic tool.) It would be a pretty unproductive phoneme though.

> I didn't claim and don't believe that English is developing lexical tones. But I do believe that the development of lexical tone in this single unusual word is fundamentally similar to the larger-scale development of tone in other languages, and that the still-obvious relationship between the phrase and the tone sequence makes this a good example to help English speakers understand how it can happen.

I'm not deeply versed in tonogenesis - but that is interesting as a potential source (phrasal tone). I wonder what conditions could lead to phrase-related tonal patterns becoming prominent/frequent enough to be a source of more prototypical lexical tone.

> > And of course there's more than just question-associated tone, there's also focus-associated tonal prosody.

> Very true, but much harder to describe.

It's been discussed fairly extensively though, at least as far back as Jackendoff (1972 or thereabouts).

That can be said in many different ways, so it’s not clear what you mean.

That has to do with emphasis, not tones, and it's common with noun-verb pairings like that.

None of those turn into completely different words based on which tone you use to pronounce it; a person would still know what you mean based on the sentence context but it would sound off.

I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.

Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p...

(that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)

Punjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.

There's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.

English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.

For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU

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