Many of you have probably heard of the phenomenon of "tonal languages," languages where
you need to say things with just the right tone, otherwise you'll wind up saying something
completely different.
The most famous tonal language is Chinese, but this category also includes plenty of
other languages, especially in southeast asia and Africa.
In these languages controlling the pitch of your voice while your saying something is
just as important as getting the consonants and vowels right.
For instance in Chinese, ma means horse while ma means mother.
Compare that to English, where "horse" "horse" "horse" "horse," all of
these just mean "horse."
So there you go.
If a language uses pitch it's tonal, if it doesn't then it's not.
Super simple.
Until you start to think about it, for even, like, a couple of minutes, at which point
everything breaks.
Because here's the thing: tone might not change the meaning of this particular word,
but we do use tone to communicate meaning.
In fact, I can think of at least three different ways to communicate different things in English
using tone.
Firstly, you can use pitch to emphasize certain words.
"HE didn't steal the money," "he didn't STEAL the money," and "he didn't steal
the MONEY" these three sentences communicate completely different ideas, and the only difference
between them is the tone I said them in.
Secondly, you can use tone to signify questions.
Compare "You stole the book?" to "You stole the book."
The first might not technically be a question, but at the very least it does make it sound
like I'm expecting an answer, whereas the second doesn't.
Lastly, it seems like differences in tone is the main way we figure out which syllable
the stress of a word falls on, and we use stress to distinguish between different words.
Permit is a noun, while permit is a verb, and you can actually experimentally show that
the main way we tell the difference is by looking at which syllable has the higher pitch.
Situations like this are rare in English, but there are more, like incline vs incline
or intern vs intern.
If you're anything like me, you might easily look at all this and get the impression that
English is actually a tonal language.
Or at least that this whole thing is a lot more complicated than people generally let
on.
Well, I'm hear to tell you that it's the second one, but people don't usually go
into the details because it gets really confusing and difficult to talk about really quickly.
So, on that note, let's dive in!
Buckle up everyone because we're about to get technical.
Let's start by defining some terms, because I've been using the word "tone" kind
of sloppily this whole video.
On a piano, which key you press determines the pitch of the sound, while how hard you
push it controls the volume.
Pitch is basically the frequency of the sound wave, while volume is the amplitude.
Now, you might notice you can play a note on a piano and then play the same note at
the same volume on a violin, but they'll still sound different.
This is because of timbre, which for are purposes is basically the texture of the sound.
Pause the screen now if you want to get into the physics of it, but for the rest of you
we can just move on.
Now, almost all of the time in language it's the timbre of the sound that's communicating
information, which is why you can take an audio recording and raise the pitch or lower
the pitch or make it louder or quieter and most of the time it'll mean exactly the
same thing as before.
But as we noted earlier with these three things, pitch also sometimes communicates information.
So, if your definition of a tonal language is just "a language that incorporates pitch
somehow," then, yes, English would be a tonal language, along with probably every
language ever.
But usually when linguists say that a language is tonal, they mean that it uses pitch to
communicate lexical information.
All that means is that pitch is used to distinguish one word from another.
"Pink and FLUFFY" might mean something different from "PINK and fluffy?", but
those differences are post-lexical: above the level of the word.
The pitch changes things like which word is more important and whether the phrase as a
whole is a question or not, it doesn't change what words there are or what order they're
in.
Which lets us deal with these two, but there's still a case to be made that English is tonal
because of "accent."
What I mean by accent is that within a word some syllables feel more prominent or important
than others.
In "permit" the accent is on the first syllable, while in "permit" it's on
the second one.
It looks a lot like the main way we tell which syllable has the accent is the fact that the
accented syllable has a higher pitch, so English uses pitch to distinguish between words, so
that must make it tonal.
However, there are two huge differences between what English does and what true tonal languages
do.
The first is that pitch isn't always the main way we tell where the accent is in a
word.
Thing is, in English, when a word is the focus of a whole sentence, we usually give the accented
syllable of that word higher pitch, and when we say "permit" and "permit" all on
their own like that we're kind of saying them as if they're making up a whole sentence
all on their own, so of course they're going to have the focus, so of course we're going
to make the accented syllable higher pitched.
But listen to the way I say them in context when they don't have the sentence's focus:
"I didn't permit that."
"I didn't give him the permit" And if we cut those words out of the surrounding
recording and play them back… "permit" "permit"
Suddenly it doesn't sound like pitch is the main thing we're using to tell them
apart.
In this context you can show that it's actually the relative length of the two syllables,
or which of them you spend more time pronouncing, that's doing most of the work of getting
across which syllable has the accent.
That length difference is there whether or not that word has the focus of the sentence,
which makes it seem like it's actually the main signifier of stress and not pitch.
The second reason English accent doesn't count as tone is that English accent is syntagmatic
rather than paradigmatic.
I told you we were gonna get technical.
Alright, let me try to explain.
If English really had tones then it would be natural to ask "ok, how many tones does
it have?" and the answer would seem to be two, one for when a syllable is accented and
one for when it's unaccented.
But that would imply that a two syllable word could have one of four different tone patterns:
one where the first one's accented, one where the second one's accented, one where
both are and one where neither are.
But that's not allowed: each word needs to have exactly one accented syllable: no
more, no less.
Permit and permit are both valid words, but PER-MIT and permit aren't.
This makes it look like English accent isn't really an innate quality of the syllable,
but rather, which syllable is accented is a property of the word.
If the accented-ness of each syllable varied independently then we could call English accent
paradigmatic, but the fact that they can't and that each word has exactly one accent
means that it's syntagmatic.
With this in mind we can say that a tonal language is a language that makes paradigmatic
lexical distinctions based primarily on pitch and English pretty clearly fails that definition.
In fact, there are cases of languages that are even closer to being tonal but still don't
meet this bar.
Japanese has syntagmatic accent like English, but unlike in English this accent is primarily
distinguished using pitch.
Languages like these are called pitch-accent languages, because, well, they mark accents
with pitch.
So, I hope that clears up why English isn't tonal, but for me at least, all of this kind
of raised more questions than it answered.
Like, if English uses pitch to communicate post-lexical information, like which word
is most important or whether the sentence is a question, then can tonal languages not
do that?
Like, if Chinese is already using pitch so much to distinguish between different words,
it sounds like they wouldn't be able to use pitch to emphasize words or mark questions
like English speakers do.
But that's not actually true.
It works differently than in English, but Chinese uses pitch to communicate both lexical
and post-lexical information.
One way that linguists used to think about this was basically in terms of adding functions.
You start with a function for the overall pitch of the whole sentence, which communicates
post-lexical information, and then you get another function that describes the tone of
each word, and then you just add the two functions together to get the way the pitch will vary
over the course of the sentence.
This is called the overlay model, because you're sort of overlaying different things
that affect the pitch, and it's pretty similar to the way a lot of people subjectively experience
how pitch works in tonal languages.
I think it's also a good way to introduce someone to the idea that in tonal languages
you can use pitch both to distinguish between words and to communicate all the stuff the
rest of it use it for.
Only problem is, it's kinda wrong.
Thing is, if you actually use the overlay model to make predictions about how the pitch
of someone's voice will change over the course of a sentence, and then you go out
and test it, the results aren't great.
It took linguists a long time to figure that out, in large part because it hasn't been
very long since the equipment necessary to measure this kind of thing objectively was
invented.
But once it was invented it wasn't long before there were a lot of tech companies
who wanted to make computers that could communicate with humans with normal spoken language, and
these tech companies suddenly got extremely interested in getting this kind of thing right,
so all of a sudden there was both the means and the pressure to do some actual science
to this area of linguistics, and the main result of that was the Auto-segmental Metrical
Theory.
Whereas the overlay model makes it sound like the speech centers of our brains are generating
two or more functions and then adding them together to produce the pitch we want to make,
the AM theory says that it's much more useful to think of a chunk of speech as containing
a linear string of tonal events.
Each language will have a limited number of possible tone events, rules for how tone events
are actually realized in the pitch of someone's voice and rules for which tone events happen
when depending on what words we're saying, the syntactic structure that they're in
and whatever post-lexical information we want to communicate.
These rules might be very complicated and they're going to be different in different
languages, but this basic model has proven to be very useful for modeling how different
languages deal with pitch differently.
For instance, with Mandarin Chinese some words in a sentence will be more important than
others, and a lot of the time this is marked by an exaggeration of the tone it would have
otherwise.
Low tones get lower and high tones get higher.
This can be described within the AM framework reasonably easily, you can just say that the
string of tone events is different depending on what lexical tones there are and also depending
on which word has the focus, and that when the tone events mark a word as having the
focus it winds up getting realized as an exaggerated form of the normal tone.
I'm not entirely sure how one would explain this with an overlay model.
There's a lot more I could get into.
Each language has its own unique system for combining lexical and post-lexical information
to create variations in pitch and volume and timing, but I hope that now the idea of tonal
languages at least makes a bit more sense to you.
See you soon for more linguistics videos!
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