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Comment by qianyilong | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.

They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.

In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.

As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.

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I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages.

Most irregular verbs also serve to increase bandwidth though: You can say "I ate" faster than "I eated".

Dang that is true I didn't think of that. good observation.

We use tones in English, too. Is it TACO Bell, or Taco BELL? Either one can get you laughed out of the room in refined company, depending on your peer group.

I'm not sure what you are trying to communicate with the capitalization there, but what it suggests to me is more stress/accent than tones; those aren't the same thing.

I've never thought of syllable accents as being equivalent to tones. Maybe you're right but to me the difference in emphasis has more to do with cadence and volume than tone.

English does use tones:

"Going to the store" (rising = question)

"Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)

English has intonation, which is different from the "tones" that tonal languages such as Chinese have. Intonation is the use of pitch to convey additional information regarding emotion or attitude. Tones, on the other hand, are used to differentiate completely different words altogether.

For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).

Tone is not phonemic in English. What you are describing is properly called intonation, which is the application of pitch (as well as stress, loudness, tempo and other markers) to distinguish more subtle conversational functions.

Stress in English is phonemic however, viz. this minimal pair:

"rekord (record, n.) vs r@"kord (record, v.)

This is a regular phonological process in many English dialects to derive verbs from certain nouns (or is it the other way around?). Future English could turn this into a tonal distinction - I think that has a precedent in Swedish.

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