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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (125824)	3/9/2004 4:47:58 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "I am not sure that the situation is so dire, but it is not as easy as Carl seems to think. It is not just a matter of pronunciation analogous to trying to decipher a Scotsman: the meaning of words depends on intonation." In tonal languages, the meaning of a word depends on its tone. Similarly, in English, the meaning of a word depends on its vowel. So tones are exactly equivalent to vowels. In fact, the tones in Chinese are applied to the vowels, so what they do is to increase the number of vowels. Our situation with different accents in English is that the accents largely differ on the use of vowels. The differences are known as "vowel shifts". For example, Cockney and Anzac differ from standard English due to a vowel shift: wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de Once a listener of standard English is immersed in a Cockney language environment, he begins to hear the vowel shift, and to accommodate for it. Then he can understand what is being said, or at least he can understand the words. The slang will still elude him, at least for a while, but slang isn't that important for business, industry and especially for high technology. The situation between the Chinese dialects is similar. Instead of vowel shifts, they have tone shifts. But they can make each other understood in ways similar to how Anzacs can make themselves understood in Georgia. By speaking very slowly, LOL. "Y'all want me ta repahr the tahr?" The Great Vowel Shift is a common topic in classes on linguistics and old English: icg.harvard.edu Listen to it here: ling.lancs.ac.uk -- Carl By the way, all the Chinese dialects have very few sounds, even including the tonal differences. Consequently, nearly every syllable you can make using a Chinese consonant, a vowel (with tone) and a consonant, has some meaning, usually many meanings. This is in distinction to the case in English, where we have an incredible richness of vowels and consonants, a richness which gives a far larger number of possibly syllables. For example, consider all the possible words one could obtain from a word that started with "str" and ended with "ngth". The only one that is in common use is "strength". All the other syllables correspond to words that are not in use in English (and so are available for you to get a trademark on). Chinese has so few syllables that this sort of thing rarely happens. This is also why English is so hard for foreigners to learn. And did you know that Swedish is also a tonal language? Now you know why the language sounds so pretty: ... The four basic melodies are (i) vänstermelodi 'left melody', (ii) högermelodi 'right melody', (iii) fortsättningsmelodi 'continuation melody', and (iv) slutmelodi 'end melody', respectively. All four melodies are included in the concept of "intonation". The intonation of the whole utterance is the sum of the lengths and melodies of the particular words and their relations in the utterance. There are two pitch levels involved, high (H) and low (L), and the movements between them. ... speech.kth.se