Postby Iversen » Sun Feb 28, 2021 12:32 am
In my opinion Danish isn't a tonal language, but rather more a language that uses stress to give utterances structure, including the special kind of stress that is called 'stød'. Let's first compare "galop" (as done by a horse) with the company name "Gallup". "Galop" has stress on the last syllable and therefore there may be a slight tendency to raise the tone level, while it is likely to go slightly down when the stress is on the first syllable as in "gallup". However the changes will never be as pronounced as in Swedish or Norwegian, and I doubt that you can find any examples where they have phonemic value, i.e. define minimal pairs. The stress pattern already contains all the relevant information.
On the other hand 'stød' definitely has phonemic value, i.e. you can find lots of minimal pairs where stød/not stød is the only difference - like "ender" (ends as a verb or a noun in the plural) versus "ænder" (ducks, with stød). Some have tried to describe it as a suprasegmental feature like stress (which is tied to a whole syllable), and it seems to me that the stød actually could be described as a special kind of stress which just happens also to affect the airflow.
It is well known among us Danes that the people on the 'Sydhavsøerne' ('South sea Islands') Lolland, Falster and Møn don't have stød in their dialects, but it is far less known that there allegedly are some areas in Southern Jutland, Funen and a snip of Zealand that also lack it. You may ask what the Sydhavsø people say instead of the stød, but I'm not sure that there even is one single clearcut thing that replaces it - like a tonal pattern as in Swedish or Norwegian. However I'm not a professional dialectologist, and I don't live in the relevant areas so I may have overlooked something.
You have to get up to larger segments before anything like tones affect the meaning - f.ex. we do raise the tone in most questions. But we can also use words like "mon" (from the old verb "at monne") that already defines a sentence as a question. And if we say "mon hun kommer" with a raising tone then she may come (happy expectation!) - but if we say "MON hun kommer?" then the tone goes down, and the implication is that she probably won't come. Tonal patterns simply aren't as important in Danish as in certain other languages, and even in the example I just gave the stress pattern is more important - but supported by prosody.
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