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I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the se
by girzel 8y ago
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
- schoen 8y agoSomewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p... (that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
- iamshs 8y agoPunjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThere's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.