Sometimes you sing your language!
Long
before I became a linguist, I studied Japanese just as a school kid. As
much as I enjoyed the language structure of it, I hated the linguistic
features marked by tone. You name it either beauty or beast on the
commitment you put on to learn it. Tone is a jewel in a language,
nightmare of a learner and burden for a translator.
A tonal language is a language in which pitch is used as a part of
speech, changing the meaning of a word. An example of how tone can
change the meaning of a word can be found in English: the word “present”
can be used as a verb or a noun, with a stress on the first or second
syllable changing the meaning. In tonal languages, the way in which you
say a word is very important, as it radically changes the meaning. Tonal
languages are found primarily in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Perhaps the most famous tonal language is Chinese, which is
infamously hard to learn both because of its complex written structure
and because of the subtle variations in tone which can change the
meanings of words. Depending on whether pitch is high or low and where
the stress in a word is, its meaning can change radically. The sounds of
tonal languages are often quite distinctive, as pitch changes rapidly
within words and sentences.
I found this example from Wikipedia, and this will give you a broad
idea how tone affects in producing meaning.
When tones get combined with a syllable such as “ma”, they produce
different words.
1. m? “mum/mom”
2. má “hemp”
3. m? “horse”
4. mà “scold”
5. ma (an interrogative particle)
These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence,
m?ma mà m? de má ma?
English: “Is mom scolding the horse’s hemp?”
When a tonal language is written, typically diacritical markings are
used to indicate tone, to eliminate confusion. Unfortunately, when such
languages are transliterated, these markings are often removed; English
transliterations of Chinese words, for example, fail to indicate how
these words should be pronounced. This can lead to confusion and
embarrassment when trying to use transliterations to communicate with
speakers of a tonal language.
In addition to Chinese, many Asian languages like Thai and Vietnamese
are also tonal, and these languages also have unique regional dialects
which may further change the inflections of words. In African, Hausa and
Maasai are two common examples of tonal languages, although there are
many more. In South America, many pre-Columbian languages such as some
Mayan dialects are tonal.
No one really knows why some regions have numerous tonal languages
and others have none.
All sorts of theories have been posited, and linguists have shown how
tonal languages evolve, but there is no hard and fast explanation for
what leads a society to develop, or drop, a tonal language. Ancient
Greek, for example, was tonal, and the tonal sounds of this language led
to the development of an early set of diacritical markings so that
written Greek could be understood. Modern Greek, however, lacks a tonal
element, although it is clearly derived from Ancient Greek.
The specific sounds of a tonal language are sometimes called tonemes.
All languages use tone and pitch to some extent to convey meaning,
including European languages, which are among a family of pitch accent
languages. In a tonal language, however, sound carries a word of
subtlety which can be frustrating for adult language learners.
Although we cannot call Sinhalese as a tonal language, we use tone
and stress to indicate certain emotions and feelings. Yes, you sing your
language sometimes. |