Re: UNSTRESSED WORDS

On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Jim Grossmann wrote:

> Many years ago, I took an intro to Mandarin course.   Our instructor, a
> native speaker of Mandarin, identified a "fifth" tone, neutral tone, used in
> unstressed syllables.
>
> Unstressed words included some particles and classifiers.
>
> Q:    Under what circumstances are syllables in Mandarin unstressed?
>
>
> In my tone language, I think I'm going to confine the unstressed syllables
> to certain one-syllable conjunctions and particles, and to some prefixes.
>
> In most words, stress will be equal on all syllables so that the tones can
> be heard equally.
>
> Q:    Is this scheme at all natural?   Is there some way to make it easier
> to pronounce?
>
> Thanks,
>
I've finally found something about this, in Jerry Norman's _Chinese_,
oages 148 and 149. Native speakers of all Chinese languages appear
to use the "fifth" tone for particles and grammatic suffixes (le, zi,
and so on, Norman doesn't mention classifiers, but I remember from when
I studied Chinese myself that at least _ge_ should be included too).
Native speakers of Northern Chinese employ the weak stress, and hence
the "fifth" tone also in other lexemes. This is not to say that weakly
stressed syllables are pronounced tonelessly, their pronounciation depends
on the context.

I'm not so sure about the unstressed prefixes - but I seem to remember
that Khmuic languages show that pattern, too. The name of Svantesson
seems to crop up, but I can't find it presently - you might do a search
on it, perhaps you have more luck or a better search engine.

So, on the whole, I'd say that your system is quite natural, and it
shouldn't be too hard to pronounce, especially if you allow tone-sandhi
between the stressed syllables!


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt