Hard vs soft tonal languages

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Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jun 03, 2021 1:09 pm

I've been thinking about this for a few days and I was inspired to post about this after seeing Lichtrausch's "The Pitch Accent Wars" thread. I think current terms like "tonal vs pitch accent" and "simple vs complex tone" are inadequate to group languages that cannot be learned without addressing tone from languages that can, so I'm proposing "hard" vs "soft" tonal languages.

Hard tonal languages (such as Mandarin, Yoruba, and Navajo):
  • Tone is one of the first things you learn.
  • There may be many minimal pairs, and there is a good chance of mixing one word for another if you get the tone wrong.
  • A beginner can very quickly learn to identify the apparent tone of any given syllable (disregarding complications like tone sandhi or tone terracing).
  • Tone will almost certainly be part of a major writing system for this language.
  • Tone creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the overall sentence prosody exists subtly underneath it.
Soft tonal languages (such as Norwegian, Japanese, and Xhosa):
  • Many people will tell learners not to bother with tone, although some sticklers will insist.
  • There are few minimal pairs, save for a few famous examples, such bønner (beans) vs bønder (farmers) in Norwegian, ithanga in Xhosa (pumpkin with low tone on the last syllable, thigh with high tone).
  • It is fiendishly difficult for a beginner to pick tones or tone patterns out of a sentence.
  • Tone is not reflected in writing.
  • The overall sentence prosody creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the tones exist subtly underneath it.
Here's the problem with existing groupings:

With "tonal" as a proxy for hard tonal systems and "pitch accent" as a proxy for soft tonal systems, you get confusion about languages like Xhosa. All the issues of learning pitch accent languages apply to Xhosa, but it clearly does not have a pitch accent, because there is not a limited set of tone patterns that can occur in a word.

The issue is even worse when trying to set "simple" (only two tone levels) as a proxy for "soft" and "complex" (three or more tone levels). The most glaring example is that Norwegian, which is a classic example of a pitch accent language, sounds to my ears like it has two complex contour tones (involving a high, medium, and low pitch level), at least in the Oslo dialect that I'm most familiar with. I hear tone one as starting at level 1 (low) on the first syllable and level 2 (mid) on the second, where as tone two has a falling tone from level 3 (high) to level 1 on the first syllable, and level 2 on the second. In rapid speech the falling tone may be replaced with a quick high tone at level 3 without a drop.

Also, you also have "hard" tonal languages like Navajo that have a "simple" tonal system (only two levels, high and low) but tone is the main driver of prosody, it is always marked in writing, and I've never heard of anyone saying it isn't important to learn tone in Navajo.

I'd like to hear your thoughts. Does the "hard vs soft" grouping make sense, and does it work better than the existing "pitch accent vs tonal" or "simple vs complex" groupings? Does any language you are learning fit in with these groupings?
Last edited by Deinonysus on Thu Jun 03, 2021 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jun 03, 2021 1:32 pm

I had a few more thoughts that I would like to add on. I'd say that messing up tones in a hard tonal language is like missing some subtle vowel distinctions in English. For example, pronouncing "I bit an apple and broke a tooth" as "I beat an apple and broke a toot" will cause some confusion and it may take a second for a listener who isn't used to your accent to figure out what you meant, although they will figure it out after a few seconds because of context clues. Similarly, I assume that a native Mandarin speaker will initially be confused if you say in their language, "I saw my horse and father yesterday", but after a second they will realize that you meant to say "I saw my mother and father yesterday".

Messing up tones in a soft tonal language is like making minor grammatical mistakes in English. For example, if you say "he give me five cookie", this will mark you as a non-native speaker (but they'd figure that out anyway!) but anyone will immediately know what you mean and there is no chance for confusion. There may be some occasional chances for confusion but with context it shouldn't be a big deal.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Sizen » Sat Jun 05, 2021 6:49 am

I feel like some aspects of the "soft tonal" languages are being minimized a bit. I can only speak for Japanese (and for Mandarin to a lesser extent), though.

Deinonysus wrote:
  • There are few minimal pairs, save for a few famous examples, such bønner (beans) vs bønder (farmers) in Norwegian, ithanga in Xhosa (pumpkin with low tone on the last syllable, thigh with high tone).

Japanese actually has a good number of minimal pairs and many of them figure among the most frequent words. Japanese probably doesn’t have as many minimal pairs as Mandarin, but they aren’t negligible. Here are a handful off the top of my head:

(The number marks the mora after which the accent [a fall from high to low pitch] occurs. [0] marks an unaccented word, i.e. where no such down-step occurs.)

雨 (rain: ame [1]) vs. 飴 (candy: ame [2])
着る (to wear: kiru [0]) vs. 切る (to cut: kiru [1])
汁 (juice: tsuyu [1]) and 露 (dew: tsuyu [1]) vs. 梅雨 (rainy season: tsuyu [0])
かける (to hang, etc: kakeru [2]) vs. 欠ける (to be lacking, etc: kakeru [0])
葉 (leaf: ha [0]) vs. 歯 (tooth: ha [1])
面 (surface: men [1]) vs. 面 (mask: men [0])
する (to do: suru [0]) vs. 刷る (to print: suru [1])
なる (to become: naru [1]) vs. 鳴る (to ring: naru [0])
柿 (persimmon: kaki [0]) vs. 牡蠣 (oyster: kaki [1]) vs. 垣 (fence: kaki [2])
気 (Qi, spirit, feelings, etc. [this word is way more common than you’d expect]: ki [0]) vs. 木 (tree: ki [1])
血 (blood: chi [0]) vs. 地 (ground: chi [1])
いる (to be, to have: iru [0]) and 要る (to be needed, to be wanted: iru [0]) vs. 射る (to shoot: iru [1]) and 煎る (to roast: iru [1])
痛い (painful: itai [2]) vs. 遺体 (corpse: itai [0])
病む (to suffer [from an illness]: yamu [1]) vs. 止む (to stop: yamu [0])
医師 (doctor: ishi [1]) and 意思 (will: ishi [1]) vs. 石 (stone: ishi [2])
空く/開く (to open, be empty: aku [0]) vs. 悪 (evil: aku [1])
変える (to change: kaeru [0]) and 蛙 (frog: kaeru [0]) vs. 帰る (to return home: kaeru [1])
日 (day: hi [1]) and 火 (fire: hi [1]) vs. 日 (sun: hi [0])
聞く (to listen: kiku [0]) and 効く (to be effective: kiku [0]) vs. 菊 (chrysanthemum: kiku [2]) (this one is a little iffy, except in a situation like きくがいい)
橋 (bridge: hashi [2]) vs. 箸 (chopsticks: hashi [1]) vs. 端 (edge: hashi [0])
春 (spring: haru [1]) vs. 張る/貼る (to affix, stretch, etc: haru [0])
深い (deep: fukai [2]) vs. 不快 (unpleasant: fukai [0])
感 (feeling: kan [1]) vs. 勘 (intuition: kan [0])
後悔 ([to] regret: koukai [1]) and 航海 (navigation [of the ocean]: koukai [1]) vs. 公開 (to make public: koukai [0])
頂上 (summit: choujou [3]) vs. 長城 (great wall, eg. of China: choujou [0])
花 (flower: hana [2]) vs. 鼻 (nose: hana [0])
神 (god: kami [1]) vs. 髪 (hair: kami [2]) and 紙 (paper: kami [2])
噛む (to bite: kamu [1]) vs. 擤む (to blow [one’s nose]: kamu [0])
酒 (alcohol, sake: sake [0]) vs. 鮭 (salmon: sake [1])
占める/締める/閉める (to occupy, tighten, close: shimeru [2]) vs. 湿る (to be[come] moist: shimeru [0])
君 (you: kimi [0]) and 黄身 (yolk [egg]: kimi [0]) vs. 気味 (sensation?: kimi [2])
子 (child: ko [0]) vs. 個 (individual: ko [1]) and 粉 (powder: ko [1])
窯 (furnace/kiln: kama [0]) 鎌 (sickle: kama [1])
無効 (invalid, ineffective, void: mukou [0]) vs. 向こう (other side, over there, abroad: mukou [2])

Anyway, those are a few examples. There are also many words, mostly onomatopoeic, that change pitch accent depending on the part of speech they’re being used as: もやもや (hazy/misty [adverb/adjective]: moyamoya [1]) vs. もやもや (uncertain/gloomy feeling [noun]: moyamoya [0]).

Deinonysus wrote:Messing up tones in a soft tonal language is like making minor grammatical mistakes in English. For example, if you say "he give me five cookie", this will mark you as a non-native speaker (but they'd figure that out anyway!) but anyone will immediately know what you mean and there is no chance for confusion. There may be some occasional chances for confusion but with context it shouldn't be a big deal.

I don’t think this is true, honestly. I remember Dogen (an American who speaks Japanese and teaches/preaches pitch accent) saying how he once pronounced 混む (to be crowded: komu [1]) as [0] and his interlocutor simply did not understand what he said until he corrected himself. I’ve also had similar situations like mispronouncing 選挙 (election: senkyo [1]) as [0] and also being met with a blank stare until I explained the word. I’ve also personally experienced not understanding other Japanese learners when they use improper pitch accent. I remember one occasion where an acquaintance of mine was describing a particularly insufferable professor they had for one of their classes and concluded by saying “itakatta” with the accent on ta. It took me a good 3 or 4 seconds to understand that she meant 痛かった (it was painful: itakatta [1]) and not いたかった ([I] wanted to be [somewhere]: itakatta [2]) despite the context being quite clear. I got the gist or her story, so I just nodded along until it clicked a few seconds later, by which time the conversation had already moved on and I had missed what she said and had to ask her to repeat herself.

My honest feeling is that while on the whole poor pitch accent might not lead to the same number of misunderstandings as poor tones might in Mandarin, it’s not true that poor pitch accent can’t lead to a momentary breakdown in communication.

Also, I think it’s easy to not notice when speakers don’t understand what you’re saying because it’s not necessary to understand everything someone says to understand the message. I know I’ve personally had conversations with English learners where I didn’t understand a good 50% of what I was being told, but we managed to have a “successful” interaction because there were enough keywords that I did manage to catch.

When I was taking Mandarin classes a few years ago at university, there was a guy in my class who was very fluent (in the sense that his speech was fluid) but who had bad pronunciation. He was constantly chatting up Chinese students on the campus and had made himself a number of friends in this manner. One of those people happened to also be one of my close friends. I once asked him how well the fluent guy spoke and he responded jokingly that he didn’t understand him at all. Obviously, that wasn’t completely true since they managed to have conversations, but basically, there were tons of things that he didn’t understand but he didn’t need to understand them for the conversation to flow. As a result, the guy in my class was under the impression that he was being understood when in reality most of what he said was passing over the heads of the people he was talking to. It’s just that those people were able to make the conversation work in spite of the problems.

While I don’t think situations like this are nearly as pronounced with Japanese, the truth is that people will have a hard time anyway. When I lived in Shinjuku back in 2011, I was in a share house owned by an American man who had been living in Japan for quite a few years. I remember when I first met him that he told me that he could help me out if I ever needed help because he had been studying Japanese for a long time and had no problem communicating. On our way from the subway station to the house, we stopped in a convenience store and I got a taste of his Japanese when he interacted with the clerk. It was accented, sure, but grammar-wise, all seemed hunky-dory to me.

The house itself had 9 other people staying there and in order to make sure that there were no problems, we had a leader who would report back to the owner every now and then. The leader while I was there was a Japanese woman who I became very close with. I one day inquired about the owner’s Japanese to her and she confirmed my suspicions: his grammar was fine, but his accent made it almost impossible to understand him. The reason they were able to communicate is because she found it more troublesome to try to figure out every small detail of what he was saying and so she would work around the parts she didn’t understand and focus on the parts that she did. And just like that, he thought he was being understood and the conversation “worked.”

In both these stories, I don’t think the failure of these individuals to be understood was entirely due to tones or pitch since their problems weren’t limited to those areas of pronunciation. My point is just that it’s easy enough to think you’re being understood when in reality, the person you’re talking with is somewhat heroically keeping the conversation from breaking down, especially in pitch accent or tone languages.

So anyway, to summarize: have I personally experienced conversations breaking down because of pitch? Yes, I've been on both ends. Do I think there are lots of misunderstandings that are swept under the rug because native speakers can work around them despite not entirely understanding what was said making it seem like everything is fine? Yes, in both Mandarin and Japanese. Do I think there are learners of both languages that don’t notice how their accents are affecting the conversation? I’ve met them. Is the situation as bad in Japanese as Mandarin? I can’t imagine it is. If it were, then it would be almost impossible for the many dialects of Japanese, which not only differ on the lexical level but whose pitch accent patterns have completely different rules, to communicate with each other. This isn't to say that there aren't misunderstanding between speakers of different dialects, however.

Deinonysus wrote:The overall sentence prosody creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the tones exist subtly underneath it.

I think a more accurate description is that the two coexist and influence each other. The pitch accent of a word will dictate how that word is pronounced, but the intonation of a phrase will bring out (exaggerate) the lexical accent of some words and diminish the accent of other words. However, in a limited number of cases intonation can overwrite lexical accents, at least in Japanese. Also, regardless of all this, lexical accent becomes subtler the longer an utterance goes on for, but this is true for tones in Mandarin as well.

Deinonysus wrote:Tone creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the overall sentence prosody exists subtly underneath it.

I don’t know if this is quite right either. At least not the "subtly" part. Tones definitely create the pitch contour of lexical items, but Mandarin also has distinct intonation patterns that perceptibly bring out or flatten the tone of certain words in a phrase (like in questions). I don’t think intonation can overwrite the tone of a word entirely, however, but I don't know for sure.

Deinonysus wrote:All the issues of learning pitch accent languages apply to Xhosa, but it clearly does not have a pitch accent, because there is not a limited set of tone patterns that can occur in a word.

Emphasis mine. I'm also not sure I get this part. Both tone and pitch accent languages, at least Japanese and Mandarin, have a limited set of patterns that can occur within a word. In Japanese the number of pitch contours a word could have is equal to the number of morae plus one, and minus one for every heavy syllable the word contains. In Mandarin, the number of pitch contours a word can have is limited to the number of syllables multiplied by the number of tones. (Except technically, it's more complicated because non-initial syllables in multisyllabic words could have neutral tones.) The main difference between pitch accent and tone that I see is that the pitch contours of a tonal language apply to each syllable and can be differentiated in isolation, while the pitch contours of a pitch accent language are spread over multiple syllables and sometimes even extend beyond the word and cannot be differentiated in isolation (i.e., you need at least two syllables to differentiate the pitches). The reason I assume Xhosa has tones is not because any word could have an unlimited number of pitch contours, but because those pitch contours can be identified in isolation.

Anyways, I'm not an authority or anything. I'm just interested in pitch and this is my experience with Japanese, Mandarin and speakers of those languages.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Saim » Sat Jun 05, 2021 7:24 am

Only tangentially related to how best to learn these systems, but I find it interesting that the linguist Larry Hyman argues that pitch accent isn't a cohesive category:

https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman/papers/2009-hyman-pitchaccent.pdf

While there is agreement that certain properties converge to characterize two prosodic prototypes, tone and
stress, the term ‘‘pitch-accent” is frequently adopted to refer to a defective tone system whose tone is obligatory, culminative, privative, metrical, and/or restricted in distribution. Drawing from a database of ca. 600 tone systems, I show that
none of these properties is found in all systems claimed to be accentual and that all five are amply attested in canonical
tone systems. Since all one can say is that alleged pitch-accent systems exhibit significant constraints on the distribution
of their tonal contrasts, they do not constitute a coherent prosodic ‘‘type”. Rather, alleged ‘‘pitch-accent” systems freely
pick-and-choose properties from the tone and stress prototypes, producing mixed, ambiguous, and sometimes analytically
indeterminate systems which appear to be ‘‘intermediate”. There thus is no pitch-accent prototype, nor can prosodic systems be treated as a continuum placed along a single linear dimension.


Another interesting thing to note is that Punjabi is generally analysed as having tone, and yet most words are accentless (i.e. have "level tone"), which I haven't seen in other tonal languages.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby leosmith » Thu Jun 10, 2021 1:45 am

Hard tonal languages list:
Deinonysus wrote:Tone is one of the first things you learn.

All pronunciation should be, but I’m not sure why this is on the list.
There may be many minimal pairs, and there is a good chance of mixing one word for another if you get the tone wrong.

True.
A beginner can very quickly learn to identify the apparent tone of any given syllable (disregarding complications like tone sandhi or tone terracing).

This is not easy – do you speak any tonal languages? Regardless, I’m not sure why this is on a list for determining whether a language is tonal or not.
Tone will almost certainly be part of a major writing system for this language.

Never in Chinese. Less often than not in Thai. Or are you talking about phonetic scripts?
Tone creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the overall sentence prosody exists subtly underneath it.

You may be able to say the pitch contour of a sentence is less of a departure from the sum of the pitch contours of the individual words than in a non-tonal language. But I’m not sure about it - have you seen graphs to this effect?
Soft tonal list:
Many people will tell learners not to bother with tone, although some sticklers will insist.

Probably true, but I’m not sure why this is on the list.
There are few minimal pairs.

Depending on how you define “few”, this may not be true for Japanese.
It is fiendishly difficult for a beginner to pick tones or tone patterns out of a sentence.

Not true, imo. I haven’t even studied Japanese pitch accent, other than to watch a couple short videos, and it’s very easy for me to pick out the tones. It took months for Thai and Mandarin.
Tone is not reflected in writing.

I don’t understand this comment. Are you saying that when you read a sentence, you have to guess what the tones are? That would be false, but maybe you meant something else.
Although Wikipedia says:
Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word.

If we ignore established classifications, I think one could consider Japanese to be a two tone language. I could be wrong, but from my beginner’s pitch accent point of view I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Even English could be considered tonal. Stressed vowels are not only pronounced longer and louder, but also with a higher tone. And we do all sorts of tonal contortions at the sentence level.

So where do we draw the line? I don’t know what makes the most sense, and I don’t know the true linguistic definition, but I believe if making tone mistakes means there is a high probability you won’t be understood, you are speaking a tonal language. If there is a high probability of being understood regardless of tone, you are speaking a non tonal language. Vague, but I think even the most adamant pitch accent advocates will admit having zero knowledge of pitch accent won’t keep you from being understood.

But I reiterate, one should learn pronunciation, all of it, in the beginning, and continue to monitor oneself occasionally to stay on track. If you do that, then there will be no need to worry about how your language is classified.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:02 am

Sizen wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:All the issues of learning pitch accent languages apply to Xhosa, but it clearly does not have a pitch accent, because there is not a limited set of tone patterns that can occur in a word.

Emphasis mine. I'm also not sure I get this part. Both tone and pitch accent languages, at least Japanese and Mandarin, have a limited set of patterns that can occur within a word. In Japanese the number of pitch contours a word could have is equal to the number of morae plus one, and minus one for every heavy syllable the word contains. In Mandarin, the number of pitch contours a word can have is limited to the number of syllables multiplied by the number of tones. (Except technically, it's more complicated because non-initial syllables in multisyllabic words could have neutral tones.) The main difference between pitch accent and tone that I see is that the pitch contours of a tonal language apply to each syllable and can be differentiated in isolation, while the pitch contours of a pitch accent language are spread over multiple syllables and sometimes even extend beyond the word and cannot be differentiated in isolation (i.e., you need at least two syllables to differentiate the pitches). The reason I assume Xhosa has tones is not because any word could have an unlimited number of pitch contours, but because those pitch contours can be identified in isolation.

Anyways, I'm not an authority or anything. I'm just interested in pitch and this is my experience with Japanese, Mandarin and speakers of those languages.

Thank you for the very detailed and insightful response! Your experience with Japanese and Mandarin is much greater than mine, so I don't know that I can comment specifically on most of what you have written, but I would like to try to clarify this bit.

As I understand it, although there are many patterns that a Japanese word can have, there is a much more limited number of patterns that a word can have given that a certain syllable receives the accent.

Now, it's hard to find any two papers that agree on how tone works in Xhosa, but based on my current limited understanding, tone isn't determined at the word level but at the morpheme level, so a prefix might have a certain tone pattern, and the root may have another certain tone pattern, and then a suffix may have another tone pattern, so there won't be an overall predictable tone pattern for an entire word based around any particular syllable.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jun 10, 2021 1:26 pm

leosmith wrote:Hard tonal languages list:
Deinonysus wrote:Tone is one of the first things you learn.

All pronunciation should be, but I’m not sure why this is on the list.
There may be many minimal pairs, and there is a good chance of mixing one word for another if you get the tone wrong.

True.
A beginner can very quickly learn to identify the apparent tone of any given syllable (disregarding complications like tone sandhi or tone terracing).

This is not easy – do you speak any tonal languages? Regardless, I’m not sure why this is on a list for determining whether a language is tonal or not.

I don't speak any tonal language at a particularly high level, but I have spent a non-trivial amount of time on Norwegian, Xhosa, and Navajo, and I have also spent some time working on Mandarin and Yoruba pronunciation. I took a year of Japanese in college but at the time I was not even aware of what a pitch accent was, let alone that the language I was studying had one.

I have also dabbled in Ancient Greek but as there are no native speakers I had to improvise the pitch accent. Since the ancient Greeks were so meticulous about writing the accent, maybe it was a rare pitch accent that was a hard tonal system. But then again maybe they were just particularly anal.

Tone will almost certainly be part of a major writing system for this language.

Never in Chinese. Less often than not in Thai. Or are you talking about phonetic scripts?

That was why I very carefully said a major writing system, not the main writing system. Pinyin is the most common Romanization system for Mandarin, and Mandarin words will only usually be romanized without tone if it's in a text that's intended for Westerners who would not even know how to begin with tone. Although now that I think about it, Hanzi don't directly show tone you would not confuse a word with one tone with a word with another tone, because they would use different characters. I have never studied Thai but as I understand it you can generally infer tone based on spelling rules.

In contrast, even pretty serious romanization systems for Japanese (writing Tōkyō instead of Tokyo, for instance), will not use pitch. Pitch would probably only show up in a dictionary.

Tone creates the primary pitch contour of a sentence, and the overall sentence prosody exists subtly underneath it.

You may be able to say the pitch contour of a sentence is less of a departure from the sum of the pitch contours of the individual words than in a non-tonal language. But I’m not sure about it - have you seen graphs to this effect?

No, this is based on my personal impressions of languages that I consider to have hard or soft tonal systems.

Many people will tell learners not to bother with tone, although some sticklers will insist.

Probably true, but I’m not sure why this is on the list.
There are few minimal pairs.

Depending on how you define “few”, this may not be true for Japanese.

Maybe "few" was the wrong word. There are some fairy important tonal minimal pairs in Xhosa too, such as second vs third person verb subject prefixes.

It is fiendishly difficult for a beginner to pick tones or tone patterns out of a sentence.

Not true, imo. I haven’t even studied Japanese pitch accent, other than to watch a couple short videos, and it’s very easy for me to pick out the tones. It took months for Thai and Mandarin.

That is the opposite of my experience. It took me a very long time (maybe a month of serious study?) to be able to pick Norwegian tones out of sentences, but I was able to identify apparent tone in Mandarin within hours. Navajo was even easier. Yoruba was a bit trickier than Mandarin due to a level rather than contour system, and picking tones out of a sentence would probably prove more difficult due to terracing. The most trouble I've had with a tone system is Xhosa. I am still lost trying to wrap my head around the tone system.

I am a classically trained singer so my results are probably not typical.

Tone is not reflected in writing.

I don’t understand this comment. Are you saying that when you read a sentence, you have to guess what the tones are? That would be false, but maybe you meant something else.
Although Wikipedia says:
Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word.

If we ignore established classifications, I think one could consider Japanese to be a two tone language. I could be wrong, but from my beginner’s pitch accent point of view I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Even English could be considered tonal. Stressed vowels are not only pronounced longer and louder, but also with a higher tone. And we do all sorts of tonal contortions at the sentence level.

So where do we draw the line? I don’t know what makes the most sense, and I don’t know the true linguistic definition, but I believe if making tone mistakes means there is a high probability you won’t be understood, you are speaking a tonal language. If there is a high probability of being understood regardless of tone, you are speaking a non tonal language. Vague, but I think even the most adamant pitch accent advocates will admit having zero knowledge of pitch accent won’t keep you from being understood.

But I reiterate, one should learn pronunciation, all of it, in the beginning, and continue to monitor oneself occasionally to stay on track. If you do that, then there will be no need to worry about how your language is classified.

In Norwegian or Xhosa, there is often no way to tell apart tonal minimal pairs. For example, in Xhosa, ithanga could be thigh or pumpkin depending on tone, and uthetha could mean you are speaking or he/she is speaking depending on tone. Some tonal minimal pairs in Norwegian are spelled differently (bønner/bønder) but others are not (uttale/uttale).

Japanese is a slight exception because minimal pairs can be distinguished due to different kanji being used, but that is possibly just a relic of using Chinese characters. Tone is not indicated in hiragana or katakana. I don't know enough about the Japanese pitch accent to have a strong opinion about whether it's a "fully tonal" or "pitch accent" language. My main point is that pitch accent vs tonal isn't always relevant to the question of whether or not you can get away with not studying tone, and there are other patterns that follow from that question, hence my proposal for a new categorization system.

Although pitch is a factor in a stress accent, there are not contrasting pitch patterns available on the accented syllable, so I don't agree that it would be appropriate to say English has a pitch accent.

I agree completely that no aspect of pronunciation should be ignored. I am a big stickler for getting all the small details right that I am aware of.
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jun 10, 2021 3:36 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I have also dabbled in Ancient Greek but as there are no native speakers I had to improvise the pitch accent. Since the ancient Greeks were so meticulous about writing the accent, maybe it was a rare pitch accent that was a hard tonal system. But then again maybe they were just particularly anal.

Were they? The accent diacritics didn't exist in Classical period. They were invented in Hellenistic period, but even then they weren't commonly used. The polytonic writing system was firmly established in the times when the actual pitch accent in speech had already disappeared (and for quite some time).
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Mista » Thu Jun 10, 2021 3:41 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I have also dabbled in Ancient Greek but as there are no native speakers I had to improvise the pitch accent. Since the ancient Greeks were so meticulous about writing the accent, maybe it was a rare pitch accent that was a hard tonal system. But then again maybe they were just particularly anal.

This is a misunderstanding. The ancient Greeks didn't write accents, they were first introduced in the hellenistic period, but are used consequently only in modern editions. The same goes for things like using a space between words and distingushing between majuscules and minuscules. Modern editions of Ancient Greek texts look nothing like what they did back then!
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Re: Hard vs soft tonal languages

Postby Axon » Thu Jun 10, 2021 3:47 pm

Deinonysus wrote:That was why I very carefully said a major writing system, not the main writing system. Pinyin is the most common Romanization system for Mandarin, and Mandarin words will only usually be romanized without tone if it's in a text that's intended for Westerners who would not even know how to begin with tone. Although now that I think about it, Hanzi don't directly show tone you would not confuse a word with one tone with a word with another tone, because they would use different characters. I have never studied Thai but as I understand it you can generally infer tone based on spelling rules.


Mandarin words are frequently Romanized without tone for and by native speakers in the form of street signs and storefront signs. This happens all over China, whether or not the city is expected to have foreign tourists.

When introducing new words to native speakers (such as rare vocab words for middle school exams or obscure terminology at a museum) the character is written with the Pinyin next to it, always including tone. Chinese dictionaries intended for Chinese people have always had some way to mark tone, whether by dividing the whole book into sections based on tone or adding a small symbol next to the character.

There are some characters (fewer than 20 in common use by my estimate) that are used to represent two words with two different tones, such as 好: hao3 means "good" and hao4 means "to be fond of," appearing in some compounds. These are not marked in any way in texts for natives, though it's not unimaginable that a book using an obscure compound would provide the correct reading.

It's my understanding that the Thai, Lao, and Burmese scripts perfectly indicate tone because of the inherent tone class of a syllable plus a modifier marker if it should be read in a different tone than the tone class would imply. Is that true in practice?
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