3 ms·
One point of contention in this otherwise interesting article: in some languages, pitch is absolutely salient. It doesn't generally happen to be in English, but
by classichasclass 8y ago
One point of contention in this otherwise interesting article: in some languages, pitch is absolutely salient. It doesn't generally happen to be in English, but in Bantu languages, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc., pitch or tone is an important discriminator. How and what it encodes differ, and it is indeed relative pitch or contour rather than absolute frequencies, but it is definitely not secondary.
- PavlikPaja 8y agoSome languages also use rhythm to distinguish words, such as Finnish or Japanese. It could arguably be a factor in English as well, and the cause of such effects as the "sesame street F-bomb" where the odd rhythm led many people to hear something else that what was said.