Talk:Tonal language

Sources?

Having gone through the article, which is pretty well written, my only complaint is that there are no sources cited. I'm not questioning the accuracy of the contents, but some citations would be nice. Tomer^talk 01:51, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I've just added a source - a paper explaining the connection between microcephalin and tonal languages.

--Dugouha 15:30, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Tone (linguistics)

How is this article different from tone (linguistics)? DHN 19:27, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Please see Talk:Tone (linguistics)#Article split /Merge. Tonal languages are a completely different subject from the concept of "phonemic" tone in linguistics, and should be treated separately. Tomer^talk 23:16, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

If this is so, then this very article states the contrary in its very first sentence: "A tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words". I support a merger of the two articles. LjL (talk) 01:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

tonal vs pitch accented

i thought languages like japanese were pitch accented and not tonal? i thought these were two different things.

Yes, they are different things, and the article completely fails to appreciate that. Sanskrit, Lithuanian and Serbocroatian are pitch-accent languages, too.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 12:38 CET | 2006/3/19

I think It´s very strange to list japanese as a tonal language!... May I remove that? -- NIC1138 03:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Hyman (2008) argues, rather convincingly, that there is no real prototype for what "pitch-accent" refers to. Such languages tend to have a rather restricted distribution of tone (occurring in only certain parts of speech or in certain positions), have only one real contrast (H versus unmarked), and occur within langauge families where many other languages are non-tonal. Regardless of whether one thinks of it as "weird" that Japanese is a tone language, evidence shows that it is. Lingboy (talk) 16:40, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

That's on my 'to do' list. It's good to know you're on board in case I get an argument about it (as I have at pitch accent). kwami (talk) 19:39, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Limburgs

This article states "the" tonal languages of Europe, but Limburgs is missing here. Which is ironic, because that page links to this one, and tonality is very prevalent in Limburgs. Since I'm not the linguistics expert (just a native speaker of Limburgs) I'd like to leave it up to the main author or others to amend this. SeverityOne 21:54, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Tonal patterns

Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In English, one or more syllables are given an accent, which can consist of a loud stress, a lengthened vowel, and a high pitch, or any combination of these. In tonal languages, the pitch accent must be present, but the others are optional. For example, in Czech and Hungarian, the first syllable of each word is stressed, but any syllable may be lengthened, and pitch is not used. In French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final syllable has high pitch. Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. There is much discussion about how much prominence pitch must have in order to label a language tonal

This paragraph doesn't make any sense to me in this context. None of the languages mentioned in it are tonal. It seems to me that the paragraph describes how stress is expressed, as opposed to tone. I suggest to remove it entirely.

It doesn't make any sense to me too. Stress is not tone, and if you want to talk about tones in other languages, you should know that pitch is risen at end of question sentence. (I'm not sure, but I bet it is the same in French)

Hausa

In the "Geography of Tonality" section, it says "Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the Semitic languages, which are not, so it apparently acquired it during its history." I would like to point out that it is impossible to have not acquired tonality in its history. A rewording would be appropriate. Zendik 20:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Scottish Gaelic

If this is indeed a tonal language, can someone mention this on the Scottish Gaelic page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Wednesday Island (talk • contribs) 12:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

It's not. kwami (talk) 19:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Yucatec?

I'm pretty certain the statements about Yucatec Mayan being a 5-tone language (with contour tones, etc.) are wrong. --Lavintzin 23:54, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

It is. Yucatec has high and low tone only.·Maunus· ·ƛ· 16:21, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Most tones

Which language is known or believed to possess the most number of tones? Cantonese has nine, and I know there is some tribal language in SW China with 12, but I don't know the name. Besides that, is there a language with more tones? Le Anh-Huy 13:17, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Cantonese has 6 tones. (The 入聲 are not tones, they're checked syllables.) It's not known which language has the most tones, but the main contenders are some of the Kradai languages of China and the Kru languages of Liberia. kwami (talk) 19:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

serious issues with this article

This article has almost too many issues to fix.

1. Confuses tone with pitch accent throughout.
2. Probably because of this, misidentifies a number of languages as tonal which are not (Scottish Gaelic, Lithuanian, others which have been discussed).
3. Lacks citations, quite egregious in a scientific article.
4. Editorializes excessively ("However, the undermarking of tonality is just part of the inadequacy of all spelling systems","The tones of Lithuanian are believed to be especially authentic...", etc.)
5. Makes unencyclopedic claims, like the rather pedagogical section "Pronouncing tonality"
6. Much of what is found in this article actually belongs in Tone (linguistics), but much of what one would expect to find in an article entitled Tonal language, such as a list of Tonal language or a broad discussion of the synchronic and diachronic categories of tonal languages is absent or given short shrift.

I'll try to fix a lot of these, but don't have time now. Derek Balsam^(talk) 02:09, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I'm well aware that (for example) Norwegian may be regarded as either pitch-accented or tonal or both depending on one's point of view. But I'm being generous about this; Norwegian can be considered tonal, while Scottish Gaelic isn't since it doesn't have contrastive tone.Derek Balsam^(talk) 02:16, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this article is very unencyclopedic, i'll also point out that it has confused me throughly and seems to include alot of speculation. any help you can give this article would be appreciated. Chris June 11 2007 3:30 (EST)

Pitch accent has been argued to be nothing more than a simple or limited tone system, per Lingboy's comments above. kwami (talk) 19:44, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Genes and Tonality

Flagged "More recently, a statistical analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh highlighted a correlation between the genes that cause microcephaly and the tonality of language" with a fact check. Probably means a correlation with the named gene and being a member of an ethnic group whose language is tonal. Probably specious in any case. Lycurgus 05:00, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, specious. kwami (talk) 19:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

English examples?

Surely somewhere in our vast and complex languange there must be some examples of something like this in english? I still don't understand what this is all about. —Preceding unsigned comment added by IceDragon64 (talk • contribs) 15:54, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

... In New Zealand, a rising inflection, or making the last syllable in a sentance a high pitch, makes the sentance a question. (I'm using informal langugage, and stereotyping, but I'm a native kiwi so I know this well). For instance with "We're going to the city", if you made "ty" stressed and in a high pitch, that would be assumed a question ("[are] we going to the city?". If you didn't have a typical New Zealand accent, however, the usage of a high pitch would be confusing, however. ) ~SigurdMagnusson

Sometimes acronyms are given a high pitch to distinguish them from homophonous words. That might be argued to be contrastive intonation, though. kwami (talk) 19:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

two diverse tone languages

There should be something that is not uniform about tone languages. Take, for example, Chenese and Hausa (Hausa is an African language). When I heard Hausa, I did not recognize it as a tone language, but I could recognize Chinese as a tone language very very easily. What makes these two tone languages? I'm not disputing it; I'm just saying that there must be something uniform that makes it possible for a person to distinguish tone languages from nontone languages. learnportuguese (talk) 21:45, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Some tone languages (like Hausa) have few tones and when the tones are few it becomes difficult for speakers of non-tonal languages to distinguish them from normal pitch changes in a non-tonal language. Tone languages with many tones like chinese get a much more vivid speech melody which I is easilier recognizable as being dude to phonological tonality. That is my understanding anyway. ·Maunus· ·ƛ· 22:01, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

French, a tonal language?

The article mentions that, to some extent, French "possesses elements of tonality". Er... where do you see/hear that? Transcendency (talk) 00:03, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't. kwami (talk) 19:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)