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.