I mean stuff like sarcasm in English (when you can tell someone is sarcastic by their tone of voice), or emphasis on a particular word to change the meaning (“I never said *she* stole it” v. “I never said she *stole* it”).
In: Other
I don’t know about other languages but in Mandarin chinese they have suffixes that change the meaning. In English we raise the tone at the end of the question, but in Mandarin at the end of a question you say “ma”.
For example if you say 啊 (ah) at the end of your sentence you’re expressing surprise or excitement. If you add 吧 (ba) when telling someone to do something it makes it more polite and less like an order.
yes, of course.
for one thing, the idea that a tonal language means that tone changes are fixed is a total misunderstanding. pronouncing a character that uses the second mandarin tone doesn’t mean that you ALWAYS have to start between 300-380Hz and rise by precisely three to six semitones or anything like that. in fact depending on the tones of the words around it, it might not sound the way it’s written down in the textbook – the mandarin third tone is a particular culprit for this and beginners often make the mistake of exaggerating the dip. in the context of a long sentence, the only thing a tonal language speaker needs to do to make themselves intelligible is to make it not sound like the other tones. and of course the existence of singing in tonal languages should prove that people are pretty good at piecing together information even with a minimum of tonal context, so even if you miss a picture perfect tone here or there people can usually catch on.
for another, tone changes also happen through the way you articulate your consonants, or through the length or volume of your syllables, which is totally unrelated to pitch. in my experience, these actually contribute more to stress than pitch does. in fact, the example you gave in OP is a perfect example for this—i don’t change my pitch at all to read out those sentences in english. so it’s silly to suggest that a tonal language wouldnt be able to make the same changes.
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