Talk:Intonation
|
|
difference between tone and intonation
If I understand correctly, linguists distinguish between "tone" and "intonation", saying that Mandarin and Vietnamese have "tones", whereas English has intonation rather than tone. I would hope that an article on this topic would explain all that. I am not competent to write such a thing; I have only a rudimentary notion of what they're talking about; I know it when I see it, but I can explain it fluently. -- Mike Hardy
- I'm not too sure myself, however, the article does say "Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance to convey surprise and irony or to change a sentence from a statement to a question." English fits the bill. On the other hand, for Chinese, a tonal language, tones are more like consonants or vowels since it almost always changes one word to a completely unrelated word. E.g. ma (tone 1) = mother, ma (tone 3) = horse in Chinese, according to Chinese language. Japanese is classified as an intonational language rather than a tonal language, but it actually has characteristics of both: hashi (falling tone) = bridge, hashi (rising tone) = edge -- however, tones can change, switch or cease to exist when going from one Japanese dialect to another, making it less significant than, say, consonants or vowels. --69.214.227.51 08:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)