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English does use tones: "Going to the store" (rising = question) "Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)
by _red 12y ago
English does use tones:
"Going to the store" (rising = question)
"Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)
- Umofomia 12y agoEnglish has intonation, which is different from the "tones" that tonal languages such as Chinese have. Intonation is the use of pitch to convey additional information regarding emotion or attitude. Tones, on the other hand, are used to differentiate completely different words altogether. For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).
- tikwidd 12y agoTone is not phonemic in English. What you are describing is properly called intonation, which is the application of pitch (as well as stress, loudness, tempo and other markers) to distinguish more subtle conversational functions. Stress in English is phonemic however, viz. this minimal pair: "rekord (record, n.) vs r@"kord (record, v.) This is a regular phonological process in many English dialects to derive verbs from certain nouns (or is it the other way around?). Future English could turn this into a tonal distinction - I think that has a precedent in Swedish.