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The Way of Chinese Language

thevivekpandey.github.io

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Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#71

Post by thaumasiotes »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #70
thaumasiotes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Even in this case (the "I don't know" sequence), the tone isn't really contrastive.

It's not contrastive in that there is no minimal pair that would demonstrate it. But good luck being understood if you don't produce it correctly. The lesson I would draw here is more "minimal pairs aren't sufficient to demonstrate every phoneme" than "it's not a phoneme until a minimal pair exists".

> the English example you mention is really isolated - it's not enough to spawn a system of tone

I didn't claim and don't believe that English is developing lexical tones. But I do believe that the development of lexical tone in this single unusual word is fundamentally similar to the larger-scale development of tone in other languages, and that the still-obvious relationship between the phrase and the tone sequence makes this a good example to help English speakers understand how it can happen.

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

Very true, but much harder to describe.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#72

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #66
natch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying.

You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones).

The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#73

Post by natch »

schoen wrote: post #65
natch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except when it does. I’ve provided examples.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#74

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #71
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Even in this case (the "I don't know" sequence), the tone isn't really contrastive. It's not contrastive in that there is no minimal pair that would demonstrate it. But good luck being understood if you don't produce it correctly. The lesson I would draw here is more "minimal pairs aren't sufficient to demonstrate every phoneme" than "it's not a phoneme until a minimal pair exists". > the English example you mentio…

> The lesson I would draw here is more "minimal pairs aren't sufficient to demonstrate every phoneme" than "it's not a phoneme until a minimal pair exists".

Perhaps. (Minimal pairs are, of course, simply a diagnostic tool.) It would be a pretty unproductive phoneme though.

> I didn't claim and don't believe that English is developing lexical tones. But I do believe that the development of lexical tone in this single unusual word is fundamentally similar to the larger-scale development of tone in other languages, and that the still-obvious relationship between the phrase and the tone sequence makes this a good example to help English speakers understand how it can happen.

I'm not deeply versed in tonogenesis - but that is interesting as a potential source (phrasal tone). I wonder what conditions could lead to phrase-related tonal patterns becoming prominent/frequent enough to be a source of more prototypical lexical tone.

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

> Very true, but much harder to describe.

It's been discussed fairly extensively though, at least as far back as Jackendoff (1972 or thereabouts).

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#75

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #72
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying. You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones). The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chi…

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#76

Post by bayesian_horse »

xiaomai wrote: post #56
bayesian_horse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

I can read a few thousand characters (I pick up new characters by adding flashcards (using Anki) when reading novels written in Chinese). At this point I rarely encounter characters I can't read (but there are frequently words I don't know). I can only write a handful of characters (probably less than 100?). I probably would get the characters mixed up less frequently if I practiced writing them, but I don't think I…

That sounds like you actually did practice writing the characters at the beginning. Which is my strategy also.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#77

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…

Actually your four don't capture my meaning. There is one missing.

3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? .. 5. Did HE contráct the disease?

Does that make it more clear? In other words, these sentences show the same "tones" (different from "tone"), but different stress.

You were saying tones are just stress, but they are not. The stress here is different from the tones.

With #3, the stress is on "contract"; with #5, the stress is on "he"; the "tones" (again in quotes because we don't really use that word for it in English, although I'm saying the underlying phenomenon is the same) are the same in both, although the stress is different.

You can change the tones and the stresses independently of each other, and when you change the tones of the syllables, you get different meanings for the words.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#78

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #75
natch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying. You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones). The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chi…

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently.

However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just my assertions to yours. So I'll wrap up with a fitting quote from Frederick Jelinek: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up."

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#79

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #78
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently. However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just m…

Yeah, so I work a bit on both sides (though not on sound stuff), on theoretical things and on getting algorithms to do useful things with language, and so (to follow through with the Jelinek quote) I will point out that getting the performance of your speech recogniser to go up doesn't mean that you gain any understanding of the underlying phenomenon.

So Mandarin lexical tone and English lexical stress are quite clearly functionally equivalent in many ways, and I certainly would be unsurprised if an ML algorithm treated them as representationally similar. But that's still different from English stress and Mandarin tone being the same phenomenon in phonetic terms --- again, in terms of the actual acoustic signal.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#80

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #77
_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…

Actually your four don't capture my meaning. There is one missing. 3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? .. 5. Did HE contráct the disease? Does that make it more clear? In other words, these sentences show the same "tones" (different from "tone"), but different stress. You were saying tones are just stress, but they are not. The stress here is different from the tones. With #3, the stress is on "contract"; with #5, the st…

I think we're using 'stress' and 'tones' to refer to completely different things. I think you're using 'stress' to mean something like what I would call 'focus prosody', and you're using 'tones' to mean what I would call 'stress'. But, in terms of the acoustics, 'focus prosody' is closer to Mandarin lexical tones (though not in function).
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