Tonal language: Difference between revisions

Tonal Languages

A feature to common to many languages around the world (though rare in Europe and the Middle East) is tonality. This is a high-low pitch pattern associated with a word in addition to the normal consonants and vowels. Chinese is the most famous such language, but in fact, most languages of sub-Saharan Africa, notably excepting Swahili, most languages of East Asia, and most native languages of North and South America, possess tonality.

Unfortunately, because the common transcriptions of such languages in the Latin alphabet were devised by untrained persons of European descent, who were largely unfamiliar with the phenomenon, most official spellings of such languages today simply omit all indication of tonality. Even Pinin, the current official spelling system for Mandarin Chinese, is commonly printed in most publications without tone marks. This makes the Chinese words much harder to identify correctly; a parallel situation would arise if photographs of birds in birdwatching handbooks were printed in black and white.

However, all language spellings are inadequate in some way. Most languages of the Semitic family (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew) are written with most of the vowels left unexpressed; this inexplicable habit can be traced straight back to Ancient Egyptian. Stress is not indicated in languages as distinct as English, Russian and Tagalog, even though stressing different syllables can indicate different words (e.g. conVICT vs. CONvict).

Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In Modern Tokyo Japanese, every word must contain a single contiguous chain of high pitched syllables; syllables preceding and following this chain, if any, must be low. E.g. the city name Kyoto has tone kyoOto, where only the middle syllable is high.