Re: tonal languages

>My L1, Hokkien, has 7 tones, which are basically 4 basic tones plus
>"short" (or "clipped") versions of three of the basic tones.
>Unfortunately, being a native speaker, I have great trouble detecting
>which tones are long and which are short--it's just a spontaneous,
>unconscious thing to me. Douglas Koller, who is familiar with Hokkien /
>Taiwanese, would be able to give you the full descriptions of these 7
>tones.
[snip]
>I suspect my L1, Hokkien, is a LOT more twisted than this. Unfortunately,
>being mostly unconcious of tone changes in my own speech, I'm probably
>unaware of most of it. Also, my dialect of Hokkien has diverged from
>mainland Hokkien and Taiwanese; the original high-falling (51) tone has
>mutated into a high-rising tone (35), and a lot of borrowed words have
>crept in from local Malaysian lingos. There are probably lots of weird
>rules that it has picked up along the way that I'm not aware of. :-)
>
>But coming back to what I *am* aware of... some examples of tone sandhi in
>my Hokkien dialect include the following: (sandhi'd words marked with '*')
[snip]

one of the thing which amazed me with the shanghainese, is that quite often, the
tone resulting of the sandhi was not par of the tones listed as "shanghainese
tones". A total count of all the possible variants( only on the material i have
read up to now, so maybe there are more) would bring the theorical 5 to a total
amount of 9, or even 12 if you count the glotal-stoped tones as distinct one.
But i have always seen shanghaienese refered as a 5 tone language. Does this
mean every body is wrong, and it is not a 5-tone one, or does this mean it
allows off-tones tonal variations? an interesting thing to note is that expect
someone with linguisicts background, shanghainese people will tell you their
language has NO tone.


>When singing in
>a Chinese language (or any tonal language for that matter), you have the
>very interesting phenomenon that tones are lost and replaced by musical
>pitch, often leading to ambiguities that can only be resolved through
>context or reading the written lyrics.
It ain't so simple. not all tonal language do so. I believe that cantonese and
vietnamese ( and maybe other, but i don't know) have some constraints on music
making, such as: you can only put a rising tone on a rising melody, for
exemple. of course the melody is not exactly the initial tone, but it preserves
its spirit. rising is rising, falling is falling. But it is true that mandarin
does not folow this rule at all, and do not respect the tones for music.

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