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As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside

As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection systems for language learners to automatically check the correctness of their pronunciations as they speak in real-time. This can be accomplished by using time-frequency analysis that detect its accuracy similar to these language pronunciation apps like ELSA speak for English [1][2]. [1]Time–frequency representation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93frequency_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93frequency_represe... [2] ELSA Speak: https://elsaspeak.com/en/ https://elsaspeak.com/en/

xbeta 4y ago
Isn't true that Cantonese has 9 tones?
- likpok 4y ago
  It depends. Some people classify it as 6 tones, some as 9. The extra three are "entering <x> level tone", which are sort of shortened versions of a different tone. So: some words end in a stop, which is sometimes counted as a different tone even though the pitch pattern isn't different. For example, consider fan versus fat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone
- Umofomia 4y ago
  Yes and no. Cantonese has 9 tone categories that have 6 distinct tone contours. The 3 additional tones fall under the checked tone category (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone) for historical purposes, but their realized pronunciations coincide with the tone contours of 3 of the other 6 tones, so for most practical purposes, many sources describe Cantonese as having 6 tones. I have an old Quora answer here that goes into more detail: https://qr.ae/pyNupi https://qr.ae/pyNupi
- ronyeh 4y ago
  I like to tell complete newbies that Cantonese roughly has "4 tones." - High level - Mid level - Low (includes "low falling" and "low level") - Rising (includes "low rising" and "mid rising") I've combined similar tones into the Low and Rising categories. If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you. It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha. I just learned to say the word the same way my parents did. The 7th, 8th, and 9th tones are short versions of the three level tones, and they all end in a consonant (like "k"). If you pronounced them the same, but make the syllable very short, you'll be fine. So yeah.... think of it as 4 tones, just like Mandarin. Three different level tones at high, middle, low pitches, and one rising tone :-).
  - inkyoto 4y ago
    > If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you. Whilst it is true that in the case of Cantonese some tones can be misused without the loss of the comprehension in a conversion, and the non-native speaker will still be understood if the surrounding context is clear and concise, that is not the case with the low falling tone, which is the most unforgiving of all. Cantonese speakers are prone to get thoroughly confused when the low falling tone is substituted for a flat low tone or a low rising one. Consider 墳墓 and 分母 when the context is insufficient to deduce which word was actually meant; it is perhaps not the best example but I can't think of a better one at the moment. EDIT: 大麻, 大馬 and 大媽 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 are better examples. > It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha. Most native speakers of tonal languages are not even aware of the fact their native language has tones. They don't think about it, they don't think about the tones. Tones are a concept for speakers of languages that do not have the tones in the first place.
- ackfoobar 4y ago
  That's my favourite pet peeve. TLDR: No. There are 6 tones in Cantonese, the 9 "categories" are made referring to Middle Chinese. --- Middle Chinese had 4 tones[1]. The 4th tone, "entering" (or "checked"), is words that end in stops (p/t/k). Because of the way it evolved, none of those words in Cantonese have tones 2, 4, or 5 (but not exactly, see below). In other words, they all have tones 1, 3, or 6. To emphasize this observation and to make a connection to the 4 tones in middle Chinese, some analysis call them tones 7, 8, 9, with names upper dark/lower dark/light entering[2]. But such an analysis has nothing to do with how a modern Cantonese speaking brain process the sounds. E.g. Cantonese has a tone-change to tone 2 for the diminutive form, when this happens to a word that ends with p/t/k[3], the 9 tone framework cannot describe that. --- Caveat: when I said "Cantonese" above I mean the dominant dialect of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou/Hong Kong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation
postcynical 4y ago
The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Spaces between words is a relatively recent Irish invention (7th or 8th century) in western written language, so it’s not like it’s an obvious thing to have.
  - postcynical 4y ago
    12 centuries should be plenty of time for a simple upgrade to improve the UX of a language.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      It was not much needed until computer text processing become a thing.
    - sundarurfriend 4y ago
      The UX of a language for most people for most of that time was speech.
      - aksss 4y ago
        Very true, and we should remember that in a lot of (all?) cultures across time, literacy (learning to read and write) was a marker of class, and/or a protected trade, and/or considered sacred, and/or considered profane. In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up. Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane. Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1] I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point! 1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html I can’t help but link this recollection by William Henry Singleton. He recounts being whipped as a child because it was thought that he had merely opened a book, but the whole pamphlet he authored(!) (and available to read in full at that link) after becoming free, fighting in the War, and learning to read/write, is an utterly fascinating account from a primary source spanning from his experience being born into slavery in about 1830 to the point where he authored this in about 1920. It’s too easy to understate but this man saw a lot of change in a momentous century, first-hand.
inkyoto 4y ago
> It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection systems for language learners to automatically check the correctness of their pronunciations […] The number embedded in the Jyutping pronunciation indicates the tone. However, the automatic tonal detection is not as straightforward as it might seem due the tone sandhi (the tone change of the word/syllable depending on surrounding morphemes), and not all tonal languages have the tone sandhi. Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien languages can have a pretty complex tone sandhi, though. For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2» which means that the standard pronunciation is «faan4» (the low falling tone) can change into «faan2» (the high rising tone) depending on the following morpheme. The tone sandhi does not have fixed rules and depends on each morpheme. Depending on the tonal language, the preceding morpheme can initiate a tone change, or it can be the following one. Certain tonal languages can have a complex tone sandhi that affects the tonal change not just in a single morpheme but it the rest of the morphemes that comprise a full word. We would really be talking about a full contextual, semantics aware automated translator that applies the approriate tone sandhi on the contextual basis to give a Western reader the correct tone rendition in the transliteration.*
- Umofomia 4y ago
  Note that while Cantonese has the phenomenon of changed tones (變音 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changed_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changed_tone), it is not actually considered tone sandhi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#What_tone_sandhi_is_and_what_it_is_not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#What_tone_sandhi_i...). Tone sandhi is phonologically motivated, i.e., the tone changes arise from the pronunciation of the surrounding words, and are thus largely predictable. Cantonese changed tones, however, are generally lexically motivated, i.e., the changed tone is part of the realization of the word itself. Cantonese changed tones are thus more akin to Mandarin's erhua phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua), which is also seemingly as random with regard to the words to which it applies. > For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2» Note that the Jyutping standard actually doesn't specify how tone changes are marked. I believe the * convention originated at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ to facilitate Cantonese learning. Wiktionary has adopted a similar convention but using a hyphen (-) instead (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cantonese#Romanisation_considerations https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cant...).
keyboard_smash 4y ago
Somebody did actually make an app that does exactly that for Cantonese! https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_app_for_mandarin_and_cantonese_tones/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.cantone https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.ca...
gumby 4y ago
> As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages There are also plenty of tonal languages outside East/Southeast Asia, in South Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and that's just ones I know of. Languages also switch, like ancient Greek.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Or indeed, ancient Chinese! Which IIRC was non tonal. There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effect' on the vowel remains and that's how these kind of tones develop. IIRC there's also two different kind of tones, pitch tones, and register tones.... Languages are crazy.
faitswulff 4y ago
Hong Kong Cantonese has six tones. I knew it was different for Guangzhou Cantonese, but I wasn't sure exactly how many, so here's what Wikipedia says: > In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.
- porphyra 4y ago
  And to add to that, there are a bunch of sandhis, which are when the tones are shifted or modified when followed by certain other tones. Using tones is so natural that many native Cantonese speakers are unaware that the language even has tones lol.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I don't understand why accent and pitch isn't added to the same bucket. In Japanese, accent and pitch is rarely taught, but incredibly important in daily life. Japanese is stuffed full of homophones which makes listening a tricky matter. BTW -- I am sure there are other "non-tonal" languages that I don't know about where pitch and accent are important (Korean?). If you consistently pronounce words with the wrong accent or pitch, (average, uptight) Japanese listeners will refuse to understand it. Say what you like about it (fake/real/whatever), it is a common response.
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      It even matters in Latin languages somewhat. Which syllable is stressed can change meaning, sometimes avoiding ambiguity.
majou 4y ago
Japanese has two tones, which is something I didn't know until recently.
- GolDDranks 4y ago
  This is not true in a strict sense; Standard Japanese has a pitch accent that has a "culminative" pitch countour over a word. Culminativity means that there is a single point of prominence at maximum. In Japanese, this gets realised as a drop in the pitch. (In variants of Japanese, there are more elaborare systems.) Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words. (Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent. +9000. Please post more!
    - GolDDranks 4y ago
      Not sure what to post, but here are four interesting tidbits about Japanese pitch accent: 1) "Culminativity" is actually considered the most helpful functionality of the pitch accent. It helps making sense of word boundaries, as there can be only one prominent syllable per word. In spoken word of any language, there are no "spaces" (there are no spaces in written Japanese either, though), so languages need to provide accommodations for aural parsing strategies. 2) The other functionality provided by the pitch accent is distinctiveness, which means that there are some homonyms (similar-sounding words), that are only differentiated by the pitch accent. However, that is only a secondary functionality. In Mandarin Chinese, tones play a lot more important role for making sense of the meaning of the word. In Japanese, they play a role, but not a significant one. (There are some hundreds of minimal pair words that differ only by the pitch accent pattern, but as many regional dialects also have slightly different accent patterns, clearly 100% nailing the pattern isn't required for communication, as long as the general principles (such as one drop per word) are followed.) 3) Japanese is said to be an "isochronic" language, which means it has (or at least, is perceived to have) a simple integer-based rythm. For example, Haiku, a famous genre of Japanese poetry is based on these rythms, unit of which is called haku (拍) in Japanese or mora in Latin/English. In context of poetry metrics, mora is often misrepresented as a "syllable", but actually, there are uni- and bimoraic (and rarely, trimoraic) syllables in Japanese. An example: 2-mora "ma-to" means a target (in archery etc). 3-mora "ma-t-to" means a "mat/carpet". 3-mora "ma-n-to" means a cloak. 3-mora "ma-to-o" meas "let's wait". 3-mora "ma-to-n" means "mutton meat". 4-mora "ma-t-to-o" means "proper/straight". But every one of these are two-syllable words! 4) The rythm of Japanese speech is not concerned with the pitch accent prominence, unlike stress in English, which tends to make stressed syllables longer and louder (and more defined in vowel quality). Indeed, it is often said that "syllables" are an irrelevant concept for Japanese. However, phonologically that isn't true at all. The rythm of Japanese is indeed dependent mostly on moras, but the pitch accent patterns, where the prominent drop of pitch tends to happen, is highly dependent on syllable structure. It never happens on "weak" morae, which are called the "coda" or tail of the syllable. It always happens on the start of a syllable.
dumbotron 4y ago
I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?
- Gigablah 4y ago
  Just because you can figure it out by context in songs (rarely upon the first listen, mind you), that doesn’t mean the added cognitive load isn’t excessively burdensome in everyday speech.
  - dumbotron 4y ago
    Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."
    - kadoban 4y ago
      I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre). Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.
      - dumbotron 4y ago
        > I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM and more interestingly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
throwaway2037 4y ago
There was a post on HN recently about the demise of speech recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800935 That said, I still think your post raises some excellent points. To refine it, how about an online learning app that plays a sound or video clip from a national news TV or radio program. (Usually, the speakers have perfect pronunciation.) You repeat the words; the online app records it; then, it shows your tones/pitch/accent versus the native speaker. I think that could be incredibly useful. My point: Speech reco is an impossibly hard problem (currently) due to infinitely broad context in spoken languages. My idea would have "perfect context", so speech reco could really work. When I was learning tones for a while, I used to record myself, then replay it. It's amazing to hear the difference between what you think you sound like and what you really sound like. An online app could help to fine tune your pronunciation very quickly.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  This article is from 2010, and it says that as of 2010, progress on speech recognition flatlined since 2001 Is this still the case? How does 2001 software compares to 2023 software? Or 2010 to 2023 for that matter
  - nmfisher 4y ago
    Speech recognition is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in 2001/2010, driven by a combination of deep learning and massive datasets. I'm actually working on a similar concept (speech recognition for Mandarin language learning) and even accented speech is becoming less of a problem. I haven't tried differentiating tones for discrete words with the recent batch of generic models but I think it might still struggle. I suspect a fine-tuned task-specific classifier might be needed for decent results.
maartenpi_ 4y ago
I've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback. I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. I just came back from a trip to China and it was noticeable how much more people understood me. Still need to work on vocabulary though...
- xept 4y ago
  What Google's Translate function are you talking about? Voice input?
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    When you look up a word there's a speaker icon that you press to hear the translated words.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  > The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. Well, if you are Dutch, all other consonants from all other languages need a lot more aspiration ;)
- oefrha 4y ago
  You can even use Google Translate's text to speech API in whatever learning program you build for yourself: GET https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=zh_CN&client=tw-ob&q=<url encoded text> This returns an audio/mpeg (mp3) response. Change the language code as appropriate. It's not the most natural sounding TTS engine, but it's free, unauthenticated and trivial to use.

xbeta 4y ago

Isn't true that Cantonese has 9 tones?

likpok 4y ago
It depends. Some people classify it as 6 tones, some as 9. The extra three are "entering <x> level tone", which are sort of shortened versions of a different tone. So: some words end in a stop, which is sometimes counted as a different tone even though the pitch pattern isn't different. For example, consider fan versus fat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone
Umofomia 4y ago
Yes and no. Cantonese has 9 tone categories that have 6 distinct tone contours. The 3 additional tones fall under the checked tone category (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone) for historical purposes, but their realized pronunciations coincide with the tone contours of 3 of the other 6 tones, so for most practical purposes, many sources describe Cantonese as having 6 tones. I have an old Quora answer here that goes into more detail: https://qr.ae/pyNupi https://qr.ae/pyNupi
ronyeh 4y ago
I like to tell complete newbies that Cantonese roughly has "4 tones." - High level - Mid level - Low (includes "low falling" and "low level") - Rising (includes "low rising" and "mid rising") I've combined similar tones into the Low and Rising categories. If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you. It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha. I just learned to say the word the same way my parents did. The 7th, 8th, and 9th tones are short versions of the three level tones, and they all end in a consonant (like "k"). If you pronounced them the same, but make the syllable very short, you'll be fine. So yeah.... think of it as 4 tones, just like Mandarin. Three different level tones at high, middle, low pitches, and one rising tone :-).
- inkyoto 4y ago
  > If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you. Whilst it is true that in the case of Cantonese some tones can be misused without the loss of the comprehension in a conversion, and the non-native speaker will still be understood if the surrounding context is clear and concise, that is not the case with the low falling tone, which is the most unforgiving of all. Cantonese speakers are prone to get thoroughly confused when the low falling tone is substituted for a flat low tone or a low rising one. Consider 墳墓 and 分母 when the context is insufficient to deduce which word was actually meant; it is perhaps not the best example but I can't think of a better one at the moment. EDIT: 大麻, 大馬 and 大媽 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 are better examples. > It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha. Most native speakers of tonal languages are not even aware of the fact their native language has tones. They don't think about it, they don't think about the tones. Tones are a concept for speakers of languages that do not have the tones in the first place.
ackfoobar 4y ago
That's my favourite pet peeve. TLDR: No. There are 6 tones in Cantonese, the 9 "categories" are made referring to Middle Chinese. --- Middle Chinese had 4 tones[1]. The 4th tone, "entering" (or "checked"), is words that end in stops (p/t/k). Because of the way it evolved, none of those words in Cantonese have tones 2, 4, or 5 (but not exactly, see below). In other words, they all have tones 1, 3, or 6. To emphasize this observation and to make a connection to the 4 tones in middle Chinese, some analysis call them tones 7, 8, 9, with names upper dark/lower dark/light entering[2]. But such an analysis has nothing to do with how a modern Cantonese speaking brain process the sounds. E.g. Cantonese has a tone-change to tone 2 for the diminutive form, when this happens to a word that ends with p/t/k[3], the 9 tone framework cannot describe that. --- Caveat: when I said "Cantonese" above I mean the dominant dialect of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou/Hong Kong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation

postcynical 4y ago

The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
Spaces between words is a relatively recent Irish invention (7th or 8th century) in western written language, so it’s not like it’s an obvious thing to have.
- postcynical 4y ago
  12 centuries should be plenty of time for a simple upgrade to improve the UX of a language.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    It was not much needed until computer text processing become a thing.
  - sundarurfriend 4y ago
    The UX of a language for most people for most of that time was speech.
    - aksss 4y ago
      Very true, and we should remember that in a lot of (all?) cultures across time, literacy (learning to read and write) was a marker of class, and/or a protected trade, and/or considered sacred, and/or considered profane. In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up. Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane. Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1] I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point! 1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html I can’t help but link this recollection by William Henry Singleton. He recounts being whipped as a child because it was thought that he had merely opened a book, but the whole pamphlet he authored(!) (and available to read in full at that link) after becoming free, fighting in the War, and learning to read/write, is an utterly fascinating account from a primary source spanning from his experience being born into slavery in about 1830 to the point where he authored this in about 1920. It’s too easy to understate but this man saw a lot of change in a momentous century, first-hand.

inkyoto 4y ago

> It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection systems for language learners to automatically check the correctness of their pronunciations […] The number embedded in the Jyutping pronunciation indicates the tone. However, the automatic tonal detection is not as straightforward as it might seem due the tone sandhi (the tone change of the word/syllable depending on surrounding morphemes), and not all tonal languages have the tone sandhi. Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien languages can have a pretty complex tone sandhi, though. For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2» which means that the standard pronunciation is «faan4» (the low falling tone) can change into «faan2» (the high rising tone) depending on the following morpheme. The tone sandhi does not have fixed rules and depends on each morpheme. Depending on the tonal language, the preceding morpheme can initiate a tone change, or it can be the following one. Certain tonal languages can have a complex tone sandhi that affects the tonal change not just in a single morpheme but it the rest of the morphemes that comprise a full word. We would really be talking about a full contextual, semantics aware automated translator that applies the approriate tone sandhi on the contextual basis to give a Western reader the correct tone rendition in the transliteration.*

Umofomia 4y ago
Note that while Cantonese has the phenomenon of changed tones (變音 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changed_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changed_tone), it is not actually considered tone sandhi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#What_tone_sandhi_is_and_what_it_is_not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_sandhi#What_tone_sandhi_i...). Tone sandhi is phonologically motivated, i.e., the tone changes arise from the pronunciation of the surrounding words, and are thus largely predictable. Cantonese changed tones, however, are generally lexically motivated, i.e., the changed tone is part of the realization of the word itself. Cantonese changed tones are thus more akin to Mandarin's erhua phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua), which is also seemingly as random with regard to the words to which it applies. > For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2» Note that the Jyutping standard actually doesn't specify how tone changes are marked. I believe the * convention originated at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ to facilitate Cantonese learning. Wiktionary has adopted a similar convention but using a hyphen (-) instead (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cantonese#Romanisation_considerations https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cant...).

keyboard_smash 4y ago

Somebody did actually make an app that does exactly that for Cantonese! https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_app_for_mandarin_and_cantonese_tones/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.cantone https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.ca...

gumby 4y ago

> As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages There are also plenty of tonal languages outside East/Southeast Asia, in South Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and that's just ones I know of. Languages also switch, like ancient Greek.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Or indeed, ancient Chinese! Which IIRC was non tonal. There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effect' on the vowel remains and that's how these kind of tones develop. IIRC there's also two different kind of tones, pitch tones, and register tones.... Languages are crazy.

faitswulff 4y ago

Hong Kong Cantonese has six tones. I knew it was different for Guangzhou Cantonese, but I wasn't sure exactly how many, so here's what Wikipedia says: > In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.

porphyra 4y ago
And to add to that, there are a bunch of sandhis, which are when the tones are shifted or modified when followed by certain other tones. Using tones is so natural that many native Cantonese speakers are unaware that the language even has tones lol.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I don't understand why accent and pitch isn't added to the same bucket. In Japanese, accent and pitch is rarely taught, but incredibly important in daily life. Japanese is stuffed full of homophones which makes listening a tricky matter. BTW -- I am sure there are other "non-tonal" languages that I don't know about where pitch and accent are important (Korean?). If you consistently pronounce words with the wrong accent or pitch, (average, uptight) Japanese listeners will refuse to understand it. Say what you like about it (fake/real/whatever), it is a common response.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    It even matters in Latin languages somewhat. Which syllable is stressed can change meaning, sometimes avoiding ambiguity.

majou 4y ago

Japanese has two tones, which is something I didn't know until recently.

GolDDranks 4y ago
This is not true in a strict sense; Standard Japanese has a pitch accent that has a "culminative" pitch countour over a word. Culminativity means that there is a single point of prominence at maximum. In Japanese, this gets realised as a drop in the pitch. (In variants of Japanese, there are more elaborare systems.) Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words. (Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent. +9000. Please post more!
  - GolDDranks 4y ago
    Not sure what to post, but here are four interesting tidbits about Japanese pitch accent: 1) "Culminativity" is actually considered the most helpful functionality of the pitch accent. It helps making sense of word boundaries, as there can be only one prominent syllable per word. In spoken word of any language, there are no "spaces" (there are no spaces in written Japanese either, though), so languages need to provide accommodations for aural parsing strategies. 2) The other functionality provided by the pitch accent is distinctiveness, which means that there are some homonyms (similar-sounding words), that are only differentiated by the pitch accent. However, that is only a secondary functionality. In Mandarin Chinese, tones play a lot more important role for making sense of the meaning of the word. In Japanese, they play a role, but not a significant one. (There are some hundreds of minimal pair words that differ only by the pitch accent pattern, but as many regional dialects also have slightly different accent patterns, clearly 100% nailing the pattern isn't required for communication, as long as the general principles (such as one drop per word) are followed.) 3) Japanese is said to be an "isochronic" language, which means it has (or at least, is perceived to have) a simple integer-based rythm. For example, Haiku, a famous genre of Japanese poetry is based on these rythms, unit of which is called haku (拍) in Japanese or mora in Latin/English. In context of poetry metrics, mora is often misrepresented as a "syllable", but actually, there are uni- and bimoraic (and rarely, trimoraic) syllables in Japanese. An example: 2-mora "ma-to" means a target (in archery etc). 3-mora "ma-t-to" means a "mat/carpet". 3-mora "ma-n-to" means a cloak. 3-mora "ma-to-o" meas "let's wait". 3-mora "ma-to-n" means "mutton meat". 4-mora "ma-t-to-o" means "proper/straight". But every one of these are two-syllable words! 4) The rythm of Japanese speech is not concerned with the pitch accent prominence, unlike stress in English, which tends to make stressed syllables longer and louder (and more defined in vowel quality). Indeed, it is often said that "syllables" are an irrelevant concept for Japanese. However, phonologically that isn't true at all. The rythm of Japanese is indeed dependent mostly on moras, but the pitch accent patterns, where the prominent drop of pitch tends to happen, is highly dependent on syllable structure. It never happens on "weak" morae, which are called the "coda" or tail of the syllable. It always happens on the start of a syllable.

dumbotron 4y ago

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?

Gigablah 4y ago
Just because you can figure it out by context in songs (rarely upon the first listen, mind you), that doesn’t mean the added cognitive load isn’t excessively burdensome in everyday speech.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."
  - kadoban 4y ago
    I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre). Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.
    - dumbotron 4y ago
      > I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM and more interestingly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

throwaway2037 4y ago

There was a post on HN recently about the demise of speech recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800935 That said, I still think your post raises some excellent points. To refine it, how about an online learning app that plays a sound or video clip from a national news TV or radio program. (Usually, the speakers have perfect pronunciation.) You repeat the words; the online app records it; then, it shows your tones/pitch/accent versus the native speaker. I think that could be incredibly useful. My point: Speech reco is an impossibly hard problem (currently) due to infinitely broad context in spoken languages. My idea would have "perfect context", so speech reco could really work. When I was learning tones for a while, I used to record myself, then replay it. It's amazing to hear the difference between what you think you sound like and what you really sound like. An online app could help to fine tune your pronunciation very quickly.

nextaccountic 4y ago
This article is from 2010, and it says that as of 2010, progress on speech recognition flatlined since 2001 Is this still the case? How does 2001 software compares to 2023 software? Or 2010 to 2023 for that matter
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Speech recognition is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in 2001/2010, driven by a combination of deep learning and massive datasets. I'm actually working on a similar concept (speech recognition for Mandarin language learning) and even accented speech is becoming less of a problem. I haven't tried differentiating tones for discrete words with the recent batch of generic models but I think it might still struggle. I suspect a fine-tuned task-specific classifier might be needed for decent results.

maartenpi_ 4y ago

I've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback. I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. I just came back from a trip to China and it was noticeable how much more people understood me. Still need to work on vocabulary though...

xept 4y ago
What Google's Translate function are you talking about? Voice input?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  When you look up a word there's a speaker icon that you press to hear the translated words.
peterfirefly 4y ago
> The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. Well, if you are Dutch, all other consonants from all other languages need a lot more aspiration ;)
oefrha 4y ago
You can even use Google Translate's text to speech API in whatever learning program you build for yourself: GET https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=zh_CN&client=tw-ob&q=<url encoded text> This returns an audio/mpeg (mp3) response. Change the language code as appropriate. It's not the most natural sounding TTS engine, but it's free, unauthenticated and trivial to use.