Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Way of Chinese Language

thevivekpandey.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#61

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #59
natch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you’re talking about a different thing. Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather…

Compare: Did HE contract the disease? Did he CONTRACT the disease? In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed. Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.

This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites:

1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?"

2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?"

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the disease, or something else?"

4. Did he CÓNTRACT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got a third party to create the disease, or something else?"

The ALLCAPS is likely focus prosody, but there's still a differenced from 'catching' and 'commissioning' which is usually referred to a difference in the placement of 'stress' within the word - whether it's on the first syllable or the second syllable (in this case). Since English is stress-timed, it also affects vowel quality. But that's rather different from tone. (Or, to abstract away from terminology the difference between English 'cóntract' (commission) and 'contráct' (catch) is different from what goes on in Mandarin with tone distinguishing between lexical items.)

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#62

Post by [deleted] »

girzel wrote: post #7

Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism"…

[deleted]

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#63

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #60
natch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you’re talking about a different thing. Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather…

Ok, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps. I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?

Yeah, the first. But... you're taking this way too seriously. This isn't even reddit. These are examples that can illuminate for non-Chinese speaking people how tones in words can make a difference to meaning.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#64

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #61
natch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare: Did HE contract the disease? Did he CONTRACT the disease? In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed. Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.

This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites: 1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?" 2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?" 3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the diseas…

If your goal is to wow me with linguistic terminology, good job? Whatever. But I think you are trying too hard and don't have the facts on your side.

I continue to believe that the case of say, digest (such as a compilation of summaries) versus digest (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it) is a very similar case compared to 好學 (hǎoxǔe, read as háoxǔe) (of a study topic: easy to learn) versus 好學 (hàoxǔe) (of a person: loves learning).

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#65

Post by schoen »

natch wrote: post #63
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps. I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?

Yeah, the first. But... you're taking this way too seriously. This isn't even reddit. These are examples that can illuminate for non-Chinese speaking people how tones in words can make a difference to meaning.

But there are technical differences between stress and tone. Stress does distinguish words in English, but tone doesn't.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#66

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #64
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites: 1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?" 2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?" 3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the diseas…

If your goal is to wow me with linguistic terminology, good job? Whatever. But I think you are trying too hard and don't have the facts on your side. I continue to believe that the case of say, digest (such as a compilation of summaries) versus digest (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it) is a very similar case compared to 好學 (hǎoxǔe, read as háoxǔe) (of a study topic: easy to learn) versu…

I agree it's similar in the abstract, but the mechanisms involved are a bit different, at least at the phonetic level. The Mandarin cases will involve rising tone, falling tone, etc. - and English does do some of that, but not at the lexical level (e.g. yes/no questions in English involve a rising tone at the end).

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #54
thaumasiotes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.

> Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items,

Well, the three words "I don't know", if fully realized, are only three lexical items.

English has three words that can be spoken without opening your mouth, with the meanings "yes", "no", and "I don't know". Yes and no are conventionally spelled "uh-huh" and "uh-uh", and consist of voicing interrupted by an [h] (in the case of yes) or a glottal stop (in the case of no).

The "I don't know" sequence consists of voicing broken into three tonal segments. It is a single three-syllable lexical item in which every syllable is "mm" (if your mouth is closed) or "uh" (if it's open), but which uses a tone sequence copied from the phrase "I don't know".

It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#68

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #67
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.

> Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, Well, the three words "I don't know", if fully realized, are only three lexical items. English has three words that can be spoken without opening your mouth, with the meanings "yes", "no", and "I don't know". Yes and no are conventionally spelled "uh-huh" and "uh-uh", and consist of voicing interrupted by an [h] (in…

I see what you mean. I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English.

> It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place.

I'm not fully convinced for that. It's a really specialised instance and it's still standing in for a phrase (a whole proposition in fact) rather than a lexical item as such. Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reinterpreting tonal correlates of some other phenomenon, e.g. Punjabi tone as resulting from reinterpretation of aspiration.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#69

Post by thaumasiotes »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, Well, the three words "I don't know", if fully realized, are only three lexical items. English has three words that can be spoken without opening your mouth, with the meanings "yes", "no", and "I don't know". Yes and no are conventionally spelled "uh-huh" and "uh-uh", and consist of voicing interrupted by an [h] (in…

I see what you mean. I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English. > It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place. I'm not fully convinced for that. It's a really specialised instance and it's still standing in for a phrase (a whole proposition in fact) rather than a lexical item as such. Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reint…

> Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reinterpreting tonal correlates of some other phenomenon

I would have said that the "I don't know" sequence matches this description -- it's just the tonal contour of the original phrase, with the other details stripped out. I don't see how that differs from Punjabi syllables preserving their (originally) allophonic tone while losing their (originally) phonemic aspiration, such that the tone becomes phonemic.

> I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English.

Obviously I can't guarantee that, but I think it's pretty likely for several reasons:

- I can't think of anything similar.

- The yes/no question answers (including the "I don't know" sequence) are a clear conceptual group and differ from normal English in a few ways. The "no", "uh-uh", is also (I conjecture) unique, being the only English lexical item to contain a phonemic glottal stop. (Plenty of English words feature an obligatory glottal stop, but that stop is allophonic, as when the /t/ of "kitten" is transformed into a glottal stop by the /n/ that follows it.) It is of interest that the only phonemic glottal stop and the only phonemic tone should occur in these two closely related words. I strongly suspect that this group of answer words has these unusual features because of the constraint that you can pronounce them without opening your mouth.

- It's a single word that contains a lot more information than one English word should. For the Latin word "nescio" to mean "I don't know" is unsurprising; all Latin verbs are marked with subject agreement and in the case of a first person subject that is generally the only subject marking. English subject marking is almost always mandatory. This is just more evidence that the tone sequence is quite different from normal words.

- English has a non-vestigial system of grammatical tone at the sentence level; tonal marking is obligatory for yes/no questions. But sentence-level grammatical tone can't really coexist with lexical tone. So I'd be very surprised to see other instances of lexical tone outside very special cases. (For example, the phrase "I don't know" can't ever be a yes/no question, and so can't conflict with the English interrogative tone.)

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#70

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #69
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you mean. I wonder if that's really the only item of that type in English. > It's a good model for how languages develop tone in the first place. I'm not fully convinced for that. It's a really specialised instance and it's still standing in for a phrase (a whole proposition in fact) rather than a lexical item as such. Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reint…

> Full-blown lexical tone, at least in some cases, seems to develop as the result of reinterpreting tonal correlates of some other phenomenon I would have said that the "I don't know" sequence matches this description -- it's just the tonal contour of the original phrase, with the other details stripped out. I don't see how that differs from Punjabi syllables preserving their (originally) allophonic tone while losing…

> it's just the tonal contour of the original phrase, with the other details stripped out. I don't see how that differs from Punjabi syllables preserving their (originally) allophonic tone while losing their (originally) phonemic aspiration, such that the tone becomes phonemic.

because, as you elaborate, the English example you mention is really isolated - it's not enough to spawn a system of tone. Even in this case (the "I don't know" sequence), the tone isn't really contrastive.

> the phrase "I don't know" can't ever be a yes/no question

Sure it can, though the contexts wouldn't be that frequent. And some speakers have final rising tone even on non-yes/no questions.

> English has a non-vestigial system of grammatical tone at the sentence level

And of course there's more than just question-associated tone, there's also focus-associated tonal prosody.

Post reply on HN