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No, you’re talking about a different thing. Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the
by natch 8y ago
No, you’re talking about a different thing.
Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.
But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that you were talking about with your example sentences.
- natch 8y agoCompare: Did HE contract the disease? Did he CONTRACT the disease? In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed. Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThis is what I get from your examples - four possibilites: 1. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who got infected with the disease?" 2. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?" 3. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got infected with the disease, or something else?" 4. Did he CÓNTRACT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and the disease that he got a third party to create the disease, or something else?" The ALLCAPS is likely focus prosody, but there's still a differenced from 'catching' and 'commissioning' which is usually referred to a difference in the placement of 'stress' within the word - whether it's on the first syllable or the second syllable (in this case). Since English is stress-timed, it also affects vowel quality. But that's rather different from tone. (Or, to abstract away from terminology the difference between English 'cóntract' (commission) and 'contráct' (catch) is different from what goes on in Mandarin with tone distinguishing between lexical items.)
- natch 8y agoIf your goal is to wow me with linguistic terminology, good job? Whatever. But I think you are trying too hard and don't have the facts on your side. I continue to believe that the case of say, digest (such as a compilation of summaries) versus digest (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it) is a very similar case compared to 好學 (hǎoxǔe, read as háoxǔe) (of a study topic: easy to learn) versus 好學 (hàoxǔe) (of a person: loves learning).
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI agree it's similar in the abstract, but the mechanisms involved are a bit different, at least at the phonetic level. The Mandarin cases will involve rising tone, falling tone, etc. - and English does do some of that, but not at the lexical level (e.g. yes/no questions in English involve a rising tone at the end).
- natch 8y agoThe real examples I posted contradict what you are saying. You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones). The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoEvidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.
- natch 8y agoLOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently. However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just my assertions to yours. So I'll wrap up with a fitting quote from Frederick Jelinek: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up."
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoOk, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps. I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?
- natch 8y agoYeah, the first. But... you're taking this way too seriously. This isn't even reddit. These are examples that can illuminate for non-Chinese speaking people how tones in words can make a difference to meaning.