Re: Tones & Pitch

Jon Kelm wrote:
>Anyway, I've heard about tonal languages, like Swedish and Chinese,
>and "pitch accent" languages (like Japanese and Ancient Greek?).
>Can somebody explain these two systems, and give some examples? How
>are they alike and how are they different?
I like to think of tones in tonal and pitch accent languages as
suprasegmental units. That is, phonological representations are not
seen as a simple row of segments, with all phonological processes
taking place at a single level. Rather, they are arranged on
different tiers (or levels). For instance, in languages with vowel
harmony, one tier has certain vowel features like tongue root
fronting, and another tier has syllables. In some South American
languages, there is a supersegmental unit of nasalization. In tonal
languages, the suprasegmental unit are differing tone patterns. The
similarity between tonal languages and pitch accent languages is
that different tone patterns are suprasegmentalized and used
phonemically to distinguished minimal pairs. If we take a
theoretical word like "sakura" that can have the following tonal
patterns depending on meaning H L HL HLH, suprasegmentalization of
tones can be represented by drawing association lines between the
tonal tier and the segmental tier (I hope you are viewing this with
a monospace font as its difficult draw association lines when one
has to type):

Tonal Level        H          L          H L        H L H
                   |\\        |\\        | |\       | | |
                   | \\       | \\       | | \      | | |
Segmental Level   sakura     sakura     sakura     sakura

The difference between tonal languages and pitch accent languages
lies in the pattern of tones/pitches at the tonal tier. In pitch
accent languages, pitch functions in much the same way as stress
does in English. Words in stress languages are not allowed to more
than on peak of prominence. Similarly, in pitch accent languages,
there can only be one peak of prominence in a word. High tones
cannot alternate with low tones. Thus, the "sakura" example just
given is tonal rather than pitch accented in that the last word with
a HLH tonal pattern has alternating H and L tones. If the HLH
pattern of words did not exist in the language, the language could
be a pitch accent language.

Hope that helps!

Regards,
-Kristian- 8-)