Call it artistic license! I spent my childhood and teenage years in piano lessons, so I kept reading "bbb..." for fun. But it didn't stand in the way of your meaning.
Honestly I'm more offended by the backwards clefs. It's all good though, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect anyone who hasn't studied it to have knowledge in musical typography.
As an Australian, don't get this at all. The "rising inflection" is really not THAT common at the end of our sentences. If you want to see an accent that sounds like every sentence is a question, watch some Torchwood and listen to the Welsh accents.
Yep. Welsh accents are pretty different to most English dialects in terms of tonality, especially because they don't have secondary stress, only primary.
Hi, I was raised speaking English in school and Chinese Cantonese at home. My understanding has always been that tonal languages are defined by languages that primarily use tones to differentiate meanings words. Yes, I agree English does use tone to convey other information other than meaning such as mood, deliberate stresses of words etc but tonal languages, such as Cantonese, do do that as well as natives do them just like English speakers do without much problem. Personally, I often encounter more issues when trying to sing in Chinese because since singing uses pitch (aka tone in speech) to produce melody and musical phrase., Lyrics in tonal languages are very often more difficult to write simply due to the because of the additional layer of consideration pitch in tonal language songs need to be addresses as badly written songs in Cantonese can become very quickly unintelligible. The singer can help by inflecting more speech qualities when singing certain words or phrases, but there is actually little singers can do to improve a song with badly written lyrics in tonal languages. Also, attempting to stress certain words is is done differently in Chinese, and they usually would involve showing an additional word indicating the stress. Something similar in English would like, "I saw him there" versus "I did see him there", where "did" is acting as the stress word. Just some personal observations which may or may not help. :) T
I think you are spot on. English isn't a tonal language. It's a stress-timed language so it has lexical stress (you have to stress the correct syllable to say a word correctly and this causes an under-emphasis in the vowels of the other syllables). The stressed syllable longer and clearer than the others. I'm a native English and French speaker. Unlike English, French is a syllable-timed language, so the correct baseline stress pattern is keeping a steady cadence with each syllable being of equal length and stress (basically, there is no stressed syllable in a French word) and vowel sounds never changing due to stresses except for a light stress at the end of statements. For example, in English "photography" requires a stress on the second syllable or you are saying it wrong. In French, the four syllables of "photographie" (a cognate) should be even in duration and stress. Both languages will add stressing to convey post-lexical information (like emphasis or indicating a question or whatnot), so French is hardly monotonous. It just has a different cadence (more of a rapid fire even beat while English cadence is heavily influenced by stress patterns within the words in a sentence). It even influences the poetry in each language (you need stress-timing for limericks to make sense for example). I think what people mistake for tone in English is a stressed pattern of cadence. English does not use syllable tone to differentiate meanings although in some cases, it does use a change in syllable stress to differentiate two meanings (like CONtent = what is contained within and conTENT = satisfaction or happiness). There is no specific rising, falling or flat pattern to the tones of specific syllables but rather a difference in stress BETWEEN syllables which alters the cadence and phonetics of the words.
In Cantonese, there are often short and long ways to say a word, usually one character versus the “full” way to say it which is 2 or more characters. I think that words can be stressed by using the full form.
@@yurashida I don't see how that's an issue at all. Knowing about a language doesn't equal being able to speak it & vice versa, and are often quite independent. Most Chinese don't even know how many tones they have in their language. And most natives won't even know the grammar rules in their language
As someone who went into linguistics in university - you're absolutely right. The short and simplest answer is that cadence, tone, and intonation are all important in English to discern things like mood and sarcasm. It has nothing to do with an individual word and how it changes the word. For example, changing the cadence, tone, and intonation of a word in English does not change the meaning in any impactful way. It doesn't change the meaning, the tense, plural or singular. A tonal language, like Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Thai, are all languages in which the tone can change the meaning of the same word.
0:29 unfortunately what you said is not horse. it's hemp or measles horse and measles are in different tones. 'horse' should have the pitch down and then go up
I'm from Hong Kong and my mother tongue is Cantonese. we have 6 lexical tones (we get 9 when we count all the tones, crazy!) and we see lots of gweilos trying hard to speak our language sometimes, too, a tonal language speaker cannot speak our language with proper tones. Mandarin speakers (they have 4 tones) also have a hard time trying to speak Cantonese
merryanthony as a Chinese I would say only people from beijing do that up and down thing with the third tone. other people who speak Chinese just use a low pitch. 1 ā high 2 á up 3 ǎ low 4 à down （5）a nature （middle）
Stop. You`re going to take someone`s eye out. Besides, you`re saying it wrong. It`s LeviOOOOOsa, not LevioSAAAA. If you didn`t read that with Hermione`s voice, you are lying.
How do you sing in Chinese? How the voice can follow a melody while changing the pitch on each syllabes? The answer is: like for English singer who partially loose the London or Texas accent when singing, the tones in Chinese songs are very short variations at the very end of the syllable while the melody follow exactly the pitch of the musical note... unless it is an American pop singer who depend on autotune to correct improper musical talent. When a Vietnamese person stutter, do they repeat the tone on each repetition of the word? The answer is yes according to an example I heard in Montreal.
Christian Gingras in singing u just use context to figure out the meaning. nothing really has pitch anymore. that's why people can communicate in Chinese with pinyin without accent marks.
Depends on the language. With Chinese, it's common to just drop the tone. With other tonal languages, artists have to jump the extra hurdle to make the tones of the lyrics and the pitch of the music compatible
Thank you for making this. I get so tired of people saying that English is a tonal language for that reason and then refusing to even discuss anything after because they proved me wrong and that's that. >_>
"People don't usually like to go into the details because it gets really confusing and difficult to talk about really quickly. So, on that note, LET'S DIVE IN!" i've found the place for me
this is maybe one of your best videos. i have yet to find anyone on youtube tackling questions like this about tonal languages, though these questions were in the back of my mind since ive heard of the concept. great work
The majority of what I watch on TH-cam is educational to some extent, and for me personally I think that you’re more effective at educating me than any other channel I watch, at least in comparison to the complexity of what you’re trying to explain. So thank you.👍
Late reply, but yeah, this channel is great. Somehow I started watching linguistics content lately even though I never had any interest in linguistics, and I felt relieved after discovering this channel. It's super easy to understand as someone who knows very little about linguistics
More or less, tones are like stress but all compressed in one syllable, for example, Mandarin tones are: ma1 = má, ma2 = maá, ma3 = mą (with a low voice) and ma4 = máa.
I was directing some English language voice over with a non-native English speaker in Thailand. I started telling her to mark the script with Thai tone marks in order to get the correct pitch for the meaning of the sentence, because the meaning was being changed by the way she was reading it. The engineer said to me that he never realised how important tones were in English, until he saw how much the meaning changed when the tones were wrong. Of course it's not the definition of the word that changes, but the meaning of the sentence. This video did a great job explaining that.
Is this a specific meme for TH-camrs who rarely upload, because I just saw the same comment from someone else on a new video for a different channel I follow.
Hello, Xidnaf! I am from Brazil and I love your channel. About the tonal languages, though, there is a great explanation on the origins of tones at the "Great Courses - The story of human language". I recall that the author said that tones were sounds that got weaker throughout centuries and evolved into a pitch variation. Keep up the good work!
Small mistake at 0:27, the graph and your pronunciation correspond to second tone (má). Horse 马 is actually pronounced with third tone (mǎ). Great video as always :-)
I absolutely loved this video, Xidnaf. This, in my opinion, is exactly what you should be pursuing for your videos: subjects that can be quite technical explained in an easy and straightforward way. I'm very happy you managed to continue to make TH-cam videos, and I hope to see a lot more of your work in the future. Keep up the good work mate! All the best!
@@kshitijvids Before stops, rising or high tones develop, while after aspirated stops low or falling tones develop. English's coda stops are barely pronounced, and thus are subject to loss, which would likely leave tones in the previous vowels. If English loses it's aspiration distinction, that could also create tones. In Modern English, vowels already lengthen or shorten depending on what sound follows, which would combine with the tones. /V/ [V̆] + /p, t, k/ > /V̆ʔ/ > /V̆˩˥/ /V/ [Vː] + /b, d, g/ > /Vːʔ/ > /Vː˩˥/ /p, t, k/ [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] + /V/ > /pV̀, tV̀, kV̀/
Too late! I've already moved to Paul on Langfocus for my linguistics videos! Just kidding, Xidnaf! Thanks for the awesome new video! We've all missed you!
Really enjoyed watching this video! As a native Thai speaker from Thailand, I'd like to add some more facts from the perspective of a tonal language: 0:28 : First of all, Thai is a tonal language because มา (ma, mid tone)and หมา (ma, rising) means come and dog, respectively. 1:00 : Usually in Thai, we prefer changing the whole sentence to convey different meanings instead of emphasizing words: He didn't steal the money (เขาไม่ได้ขโมยเงิน - vague) HE didn't steal the money (เขาไม่ได้เป็นคนขโมยเงิน : He isn't the one stealing money) he didn't STEAL the money (เขาไม่ได้ได้เงินจากการขโมย : He didn't get the money from stealing) he didn't steal the MONEY (เขาไม่ได้ขโมยเงิน แต่เขาขโมย... : He didn't steal the money, but he stole...) We do sometimes emphasize words though. 1:14 : Using tones to signify questions doesn't work in Thai, you'd only sound strange hahaha You stole the book คุณขโมยหนังสือ This one gets tricky because the word for book already has a rising tone, so we have "question sentence endings" instead. You stole the book? คุณขโมยหนังสือป่ะ ("pa" added at the end - sentence becomes a question) 1:25 : Thai doesn't have word stress. People have said that our language have stress in every syllable, but it's not entirely true. 9:08 : Another way to visualize how languages combine lexical and post-lexical information might be songs. Sometimes in songs, the tones change a bit. But the meaning can still be conveyed because we have context. th-cam.com/video/4TrDsI56i24/w-d-xo.html Try this: paste the following sentence in google translate, listen to it and compare it to 2:53 in the above link. "ศพแรกผ่านไป ศพสองศพสามค่อยๆ ผ่านไป" It's a bit different, right? More fun: th-cam.com/video/FgRK-IkJRaw/w-d-xo.html So since we have a tonal language, our gameshows play with tones a lot. Like in the above link, at 8:04, the question is "pla(mid)/pa(low)/pa(falling)/pa(high)/pa(rising) which one of these can be eaten?" or the next one "pla(mid)/pa(low)/pa(falling)/pa(high)/pa(rising) which one of these can't eat?"
yeah, i was thinking about the questions thing. as a mandarin speaker, it just doesn't work to try to ask a question using just pitch. that's what we have the word 嗎 for lol
I was happy to see your newest post. I was so afraid you had given up on this. I just want you to know that you are appreciated. All of your posts are fascinating and I enjoy watching them so much. Thank you.
I'm interested in how tonal languages are set to music in a way different to non-tonal languages. In English, usually the lyrics are written first and then set to melody, because the lyrics provide the stress but doesn't limit the pitch. While for Chinese songs, especially Cantonese ones, musicians tend to write the melody first, and write the lyrics with tones that fit the melody afterwards. I feel that there is still a lack of scientific researches on the relationship between melody and tonal languages. How are tones related to pitch? They are relative pitches (higher or lower or rising or falling), but they aren't exactly particular pitches like a G or G-sharp.
This is such a great way to explain tonal languages. Recently I was trying to explain the idea of tones in the Chinese language to my friend and... I did a horrible job articulating the whole concept. I need to show her this video haha. Bravissimo! Great job, my friend!
It gets even more complicated with languages like Korean (which is not a tonal language by definition) that has words that come from a tonal language (in this case, Chinese) and native words. This means words that had tones originally are just said in the same way, leading to a nightmare for non-native speakers who have to judge what a word means simply based on context.
In Chinese we actually create characters for post-lexical meanings like "嗎" this character often sticks behind question sentences. and its tone is high which makes the whole sentence's tone relatively rise at the end
But, the bible doesn't even say that? The Gospel of John describes Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after Lazarus had been dead and entombed for four days.
If I said "English is a tonal language," maybe, but this one is different. I ask the question "Is it a tonal language" and then show why the answer is wrong. So I think I should be good, hopefully
+Xidnaf This is a scientific method of approaching a theorem: making an assumption, and then trying to prove it wrong. It's nothing wrong with it. In fact, creeds to you for tackling this problem like a real scientist! :D
Right, the answer to any question like this is supposed to be No, with the implication you'd say why. That said, your description made me think you were going to say Yes, or that tonal languages didn't exist. Which is why I delayed on watching it.
I feel like most languages are tonal, but there are two types. One where tone tells the word, and one where tone tells the meaning of a sentence. If it's not one, it's the other.
This whole thing reminds me of calling commands for drill and ceremony, requiring a lower pitch for a prep command(forward) and a higher pitch for the command of execution(march) without either it still works but it can't be used the same way
Damn this is awesome! I'm a physics person, but I love learning languages (I've dabbled in Russian, Korean, fluent in French, and learning Japanese rn). It's so cool to get a linguistics perspective on this sort of thing :)
you're confusing tone and stress. tone is discrete. individual. unique. unrelated to the word it's part of. stress is dependent on and relative to the word or sentence it is in. it's best to think of tones like you think of vowels. you can tell the difference between the words: 'heek, heck, hack, hike, hick, hook, huck, hoke, hock' even if you don't know what they all mean. but if you had the ermagerd gerzbermz girl read them aloud, you'd be lost. sure, the joke is written using vowels, but if you read them aloud, you find out pretty quickly, she's using vocalic-r to replace all vowels. fun for a joke. a prrn in the rrss for reciting poetry. stress in english is crazy complex. it's difficult to predict and often victim to regional dialects (emPLOYee vs employEE). not only that, but it also leaves in its wake a bunch of syllables with their vowel pronunciations altered (PHOtəgraph/phəTOgrəphy/photəGRAphic). it's not all cosmetic though, it can also change grammatical class (EXport) vs (exPORT) and mark the topic in the sentence (i HATE this movie). focusing on that last point, chinese is a topic-prominent language (i HATE this movie --> HATE is what i feel toward this movie), so stress as a topic marker is not necessary. they do use other intonation patterns, though, which involve pitch shifts relative to the norm, and according to a predictive pattern. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)#Mandarin_Chinese and blah.
Did you watch the whole video? Because I talked a lot about the difference between "tone" and "stress." I call stress "accent," though. Linguists seem to use both words.
In my dialect of Spanish (Castillian), people speak with like NO intonation, and it really makes a difference. It's like people are constantly muttering their sentences. Some say other accents in Spain sound off and improper, but they at least have a bit of musicality to them, and they're certainly easier to understand at a party with loud music.
Eso mola xD. A ver, me he metido un poco con el castellano, pero me parece que, literariamente, sí que es uno de los idiomas más bonitos que hay. Sencillamente, lo hablamos muy mal.
Likewise, the choice of Chinese flag for Chinese language, when Taiwan would probably insist that their flag is correct for the mainland and not everybody in China is a native speaker of mandarin Chinese. The relation between political entities and languages could be interesting fodder for future videos.
I'm an English and Mandarin Chinese speaker and damn, you did a pretty great job explaining tonal languages that I gained knowledge about Mandarin which I haven't consciously noticed, especially with the bit about exaggerating the tone to convey post-lexical meaning! Keep it up with the great work :)
(I don't really speak Mandarin so please explain ㅠㅠ) How are "來了嗎?" and "來了?" different? They portray the same meaning(?) But without 嗎 how do you know it's a question in spoken language?
@@makeilaha6155 let me translate it: man: here you come. woman: yes, I come here. man: let's have sex? woman: let's go. man: you cumming? woman: not yet. man: you cumming? woman: yes, I'm cumming! woman: one more sex? man: I can't do it anymore now.
Great video! So much more to explore on this topic, too. I've always been fascinated about the "musical" aspect to language, from up-talking to regional/dialectical differences, to the "sing-songy"ness i hear in certain languages but not others. There are some melodies that I think many of us would recognize as belonging to one language: i could sing a sentence of nonsense syllables to you and you'd probably be able to say, "oh, that's obviously italian" or "oh that's how mexican spanish is parodied in cartoons" just based on the pitches.
I feel like something you could have stood to have talked about in this video is monosyllabic English words. You got into tone, accent, etc. with multisyllabic words, but, to my understanding, Chinese tones are applied to their monosyllabic words. "Shī Shì shí shī shǐ" is a Chinese poem using only the word "shi" with different tones. Nothing even close to this can be done in English. "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is probably as close as you can get in English, and is really just a coincidence of a city being named after an animal and that animal's name being made into a verb that describes common behavior of that animal. Getting sentences that actually have meaning with the same word (with different tones) being used eight times is possible with many different words. The Chinese poem uses "shi" with different tones 92 times in a row. Point is, if you're asking if English is a tonal language, you can quickly see that it's not, because few monosyllabic English words can truly gain different meanings by speaking them on their own. Getting into emphasizing them differently within sentences is already complicating things far too much because in Chinese, you can say a single word with one tone, like shí, and mean one thing, and say the same word with a different tone, like shī, and have a completely different meaning. Interesting video, but I think it would have made more sense to do pretty much the same video with a different title, because you really just examined how tone and emphasis can convey meaning in English.
Yay Xidnaf uploaded a video, 2016 is going to be a good year; you wouldn't believe the messed up dream I had... It had Americans elect an intellectually handicapped geriatric to the white house and tear themselves to pieces; I need to stop watching weird conspiracy videos on youtube before I go to sleep.
Trump is a strategic genius, that's why he was even able to win the election despite having all the media and so on against him. He knows how to manipulate the game to his will.
Be honest with yourself; he's just Putin's little bitch... His Russian sugar daddy got him a country to ruin because Trump's actually that dumb. (LOL, He's the only person in history to bankrupt a casino, at a time when all his competitors had record profits.) So, if you are proud of being team Putin, and want USA to have a future as a third world s*** hole, just be honest and say so. I know Trump is a compulsive liar, but, your Russian sugar daddy doesn't demand that all the little Trumpets do that, yet.
8:51 Surprised there was no mention about how certain languages do not rely on tone to convey certain post-lexical information like the "focus". For example, in English, we'd answer the two questions "Are you hungry or not?" and "Which of you is hungry" with "I'm *_hungry._***" and "*_I'm_* hungry." respectively. On the other hand, in Japanese, whether you or the hunger is the focus of the sentence is determined by a modifier (which sort of functions like an English linking verb). So the two English responses would translate to "Onaka wa akimashta." and "Onaka ga akimashta."
At 1:00 you're not only using pitch to emphasize the words so much as using *stress* (saying those words louder than the others) which is a different concept. You even elongate those words to add further emphasis, further confusing things, and then add the false statement "and the *only* difference between them is the tone I said them in". Horrible.
sorry in advance for all the backwards music notes. I had no idea there was a correct side to draw the line on
your chinese is soooo bad xd
Call it artistic license! I spent my childhood and teenage years in piano lessons, so I kept reading "bbb..." for fun. But it didn't stand in the way of your meaning.
NativLang I love your channel! You and Xidnaf should do a collab!
Honestly I'm more offended by the backwards clefs. It's all good though, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect anyone who hasn't studied it to have knowledge in musical typography.
Could you do a video that goes more indepth on pitch-accents?
So does this explain why Australians always sound like they're asking a question?
that's propably because they end every sentance with "mate?" ;)
Azaghal1988
What mate?
Wanna mate mate?
That's cos Australians know nothing
As an Australian, don't get this at all. The "rising inflection" is really not THAT common at the end of our sentences. If you want to see an accent that sounds like every sentence is a question, watch some Torchwood and listen to the Welsh accents.
Yep. Welsh accents are pretty different to most English dialects in terms of tonality, especially because they don't have secondary stress, only primary.
The "he didn't steal the money" thing would be really funny if you recorded a stress on each word to stress ALL of them
it would probably sound like
HE. DIDN'T. STEAL. THE. MONEY.
@@Victorsandergamer Ok! Ok! I believe you!
HE DIDN'T STEAL THE MONEY!!
Hi, I was raised speaking English in school and Chinese Cantonese at home. My understanding has always been that tonal languages are defined by languages that primarily use tones to differentiate meanings words. Yes, I agree English does use tone to convey other information other than meaning such as mood, deliberate stresses of words etc but tonal languages, such as Cantonese, do do that as well as natives do them just like English speakers do without much problem. Personally, I often encounter more issues when trying to sing in Chinese because since singing uses pitch (aka tone in speech) to produce melody and musical phrase., Lyrics in tonal languages are very often more difficult to write simply due to the because of the additional layer of consideration pitch in tonal language songs need to be addresses as badly written songs in Cantonese can become very quickly unintelligible. The singer can help by inflecting more speech qualities when singing certain words or phrases, but there is actually little singers can do to improve a song with badly written lyrics in tonal languages. Also, attempting to stress certain words is is done differently in Chinese, and they usually would involve showing an additional word indicating the stress. Something similar in English would like, "I saw him there" versus "I did see him there", where "did" is acting as the stress word. Just some personal observations which may or may not help. :) T
I think you are spot on. English isn't a tonal language. It's a stress-timed language so it has lexical stress (you have to stress the correct syllable to say a word correctly and this causes an under-emphasis in the vowels of the other syllables). The stressed syllable longer and clearer than the others. I'm a native English and French speaker. Unlike English, French is a syllable-timed language, so the correct baseline stress pattern is keeping a steady cadence with each syllable being of equal length and stress (basically, there is no stressed syllable in a French word) and vowel sounds never changing due to stresses except for a light stress at the end of statements. For example, in English "photography" requires a stress on the second syllable or you are saying it wrong. In French, the four syllables of "photographie" (a cognate) should be even in duration and stress. Both languages will add stressing to convey post-lexical information (like emphasis or indicating a question or whatnot), so French is hardly monotonous. It just has a different cadence (more of a rapid fire even beat while English cadence is heavily influenced by stress patterns within the words in a sentence). It even influences the poetry in each language (you need stress-timing for limericks to make sense for example).
I think what people mistake for tone in English is a stressed pattern of cadence. English does not use syllable tone to differentiate meanings although in some cases, it does use a change in syllable stress to differentiate two meanings (like CONtent = what is contained within and conTENT = satisfaction or happiness). There is no specific rising, falling or flat pattern to the tones of specific syllables but rather a difference in stress BETWEEN syllables which alters the cadence and phonetics of the words.
In Cantonese, there are often short and long ways to say a word, usually one character versus the “full” way to say it which is 2 or more characters.
I think that words can be stressed by using the full form.
@@martinhawes5647 you’re telling a native cantonese speaker how cantonese works…
@@yurashida I don't see how that's an issue at all. Knowing about a language doesn't equal being able to speak it & vice versa, and are often quite independent. Most Chinese don't even know how many tones they have in their language. And most natives won't even know the grammar rules in their language
As someone who went into linguistics in university - you're absolutely right.
The short and simplest answer is that cadence, tone, and intonation are all important in English to discern things like mood and sarcasm. It has nothing to do with an individual word and how it changes the word. For example, changing the cadence, tone, and intonation of a word in English does not change the meaning in any impactful way. It doesn't change the meaning, the tense, plural or singular. A tonal language, like Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Thai, are all languages in which the tone can change the meaning of the same word.
next video: is English a Language?
erica you damn right
erica obviously not
too real. way too real. as a linguist i ask myself what language is anymore on a near daily basis.
I'm all in for this!
Video after that: Is English even real?
a new channel to binge on
I've got some bad news for you
Lmao
0:29 unfortunately what you said is not horse. it's hemp or measles
horse and measles are in different tones. 'horse' should have the pitch down and then go up
Yeah, that's what I was trying to do. Didn't quite pull it off.
you've done a great job trying indeed
I know a lot of non-tonal language speakers find it hard to use tones when speaking
I'm from Hong Kong and my mother tongue is Cantonese. we have 6 lexical tones (we get 9 when we count all the tones, crazy!) and we see lots of gweilos trying hard to speak our language
sometimes, too, a tonal language speaker cannot speak our language with proper tones. Mandarin speakers (they have 4 tones) also have a hard time trying to speak Cantonese
merryanthony as a Chinese I would say only people from beijing do that up and down thing with the third tone. other people who speak Chinese just use a low pitch.
1 ā high
2 á up
3 ǎ low
4 à down
（5）a nature （middle）
merryanthony 回错人， 梳
It's LevioSAAAAA
Max P Not leviOOsa.
That’s latin
Stop. You`re going to take someone`s eye out. Besides, you`re saying it wrong. It`s LeviOOOOOsa, not LevioSAAAA.
If you didn`t read that with Hermione`s voice, you are lying.
Sumo Wrestler #26 no u
It’s no wonder you all don’t have any friends...
Is sarcasm a tonal language⸮
When your under so many layers of irony that you speak sarcasm as a tonal language.
Sarcasm is a post-lexical phenomenon, usually studied as part of pragmatics.
DrTryloByte *ur, but yeah.
Deldarel nooooo
Deldarel yes
How do you sing in Chinese? How the voice can follow a melody while changing the pitch on each syllabes?
The answer is: like for English singer who partially loose the London or Texas accent when singing, the tones in Chinese songs are very short variations at the very end of the syllable while the melody follow exactly the pitch of the musical note... unless it is an American pop singer who depend on autotune to correct improper musical talent.
When a Vietnamese person stutter, do they repeat the tone on each repetition of the word? The answer is yes according to an example I heard in Montreal.
Christian Gingras in singing u just use context to figure out the meaning. nothing really has pitch anymore. that's why people can communicate in Chinese with pinyin without accent marks.
Christian Gingras When you’re singing in Chinese you just drop the tones.
This very interesting now that I try to do it. Aaaand the tone just disappears, which leaves the words to the hands of the almighty context.
Depends on the language. With Chinese, it's common to just drop the tone. With other tonal languages, artists have to jump the extra hurdle to make the tones of the lyrics and the pitch of the music compatible
Chinese can be pretty easy to understand, even with no tone marks, source: six years of mandarin classes in a public school in Massachusetts
The backwards notes are tearing me apart inside
What about the -guitar- violin?
Ryan Zarmbinski same it broke my heart
The treble clef is backwardssssss D:
You're TEARING ME APART LISA !
But what if you're the one who's backwards?
The best one is “I didn’t say we should kill him”
Thank you for making this. I get so tired of people saying that English is a tonal language for that reason and then refusing to even discuss anything after because they proved me wrong and that's that. >_>
Hey I've found your comment here. Do you speak the Dakota language?
@@gamermapper I do not sadly. Haha Just my name
"People don't usually like to go into the details because it gets really confusing and difficult to talk about really quickly. So, on that note, LET'S DIVE IN!"
i've found the place for me
nice pfp
this is maybe one of your best videos. i have yet to find anyone on youtube tackling questions like this about tonal languages, though these questions were in the back of my mind since ive heard of the concept. great work
The majority of what I watch on TH-cam is educational to some extent, and for me personally I think that you’re more effective at educating me than any other channel I watch, at least in comparison to the complexity of what you’re trying to explain. So thank you.👍
Late reply, but yeah, this channel is great. Somehow I started watching linguistics content lately even though I never had any interest in linguistics, and I felt relieved after discovering this channel. It's super easy to understand as someone who knows very little about linguistics
is stress a tone though?
ur avatar makes this comment even better
More or less, tones are like stress but all compressed in one syllable, for example, Mandarin tones are: ma1 = má, ma2 = maá, ma3 = mą (with a low voice) and ma4 = máa.
Finals season's got me toned out.
there is no calm in the Mojave desert, just Joshua trees, wind and solar energy
As i understand it stress is about time and tonal is about pitch
I was directing some English language voice over with a non-native English speaker in Thailand. I started telling her to mark the script with Thai tone marks in order to get the correct pitch for the meaning of the sentence, because the meaning was being changed by the way she was reading it. The engineer said to me that he never realised how important tones were in English, until he saw how much the meaning changed when the tones were wrong. Of course it's not the definition of the word that changes, but the meaning of the sentence. This video did a great job explaining that.
XIDNAF MADE A VIDEO THIS IS NOT A DRILL
Eli Yazdi Defcom 1!!
Is there a DEFCON 0?!?! If so let's go to that one!
Eli Yazdi Hey Eli :p
Is this a specific meme for TH-camrs who rarely upload, because I just saw the same comment from someone else on a new video for a different channel I follow.
There's also a Defcon -3.1415926...
no... that's not right...
DEFCON 6
Hello, Xidnaf! I am from Brazil and I love your channel. About the tonal languages, though, there is a great explanation on the origins of tones at the "Great Courses - The story of human language". I recall that the author said that tones were sounds that got weaker throughout centuries and evolved into a pitch variation. Keep up the good work!
2:05
1, 3, 2, 1, π, -4, ℵ₀, i
Hope you enjoyed this episode of "Counting with xid"!
lol
Xidnaf, your videos are the sweet temptation that wards me against sleep.
Small mistake at 0:27, the graph and your pronunciation correspond to second tone (má). Horse 马 is actually pronounced with third tone (mǎ). Great video as always :-)
Probably your best video yet. An interesting topic, and you're getting better at explaining complex stuff.
I've never clicked a video this fast! Love your channel!
I might not've seen this video for days if I didn't happen to catch the Patreon email about it.
HA! Yeah, I forgot about that.
I absolutely loved this video, Xidnaf. This, in my opinion, is exactly what you should be pursuing for your videos: subjects that can be quite technical explained in an easy and straightforward way. I'm very happy you managed to continue to make TH-cam videos, and I hope to see a lot more of your work in the future. Keep up the good work mate! All the best!
Hey cool he's alive
xidnaf is a guy?
Pffft. Being alive is gay!
@@mannaz_y This long pause makes me think when he returns, he's gonna announce that he's trans now. He seems like the kind of person to believe that.
For those of you who don't know, the notes at 2:00 are the My Little Pony theme song
Exposed
And to be fair, nobody likes the theme song, even bronies hate it a lot.
Phirenor except if they're cringey.
Not poggers
χidnaf has returned!
rockwalker I
I can 110% see English branching off at some point into a tonal language
I hope it doesn't though
I hope so, then maybe it'd get rid of all the damn consonant clusters.
@@i_teleported_bread7404 how would English becoming a tonal language get rid of the consonant clusters? cold you please explain?
@@kshitijvids
Before stops, rising or high tones develop, while after aspirated stops low or falling tones develop.
English's coda stops are barely pronounced, and thus are subject to loss, which would likely leave tones in the previous vowels. If English loses it's aspiration distinction, that could also create tones.
In Modern English, vowels already lengthen or shorten depending on what sound follows, which would combine with the tones.
/V/ [V̆] + /p, t, k/ > /V̆ʔ/ > /V̆˩˥/
/V/ [Vː] + /b, d, g/ > /Vːʔ/ > /Vː˩˥/
/p, t, k/ [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] + /V/ > /pV̀, tV̀, kV̀/
Honestly a lot of words already can mean 3 or 4 different things, so i can see it
A Xidnaf's video! The apocalypse is coming! Good video, by the way.
Too late! I've already moved to Paul on Langfocus for my linguistics videos! Just kidding, Xidnaf! Thanks for the awesome new video! We've all missed you!
Really enjoyed watching this video!
As a native Thai speaker from Thailand, I'd like to add some more facts from the perspective of a tonal language:
0:28 : First of all, Thai is a tonal language because มา (ma, mid tone)and หมา (ma, rising) means come and dog, respectively.
1:00 : Usually in Thai, we prefer changing the whole sentence to convey different meanings instead of emphasizing words:
He didn't steal the money (เขาไม่ได้ขโมยเงิน - vague)
HE didn't steal the money (เขาไม่ได้เป็นคนขโมยเงิน : He isn't the one stealing money)
he didn't STEAL the money (เขาไม่ได้ได้เงินจากการขโมย : He didn't get the money from stealing)
he didn't steal the MONEY (เขาไม่ได้ขโมยเงิน แต่เขาขโมย... : He didn't steal the money, but he stole...)
We do sometimes emphasize words though.
1:14 : Using tones to signify questions doesn't work in Thai, you'd only sound strange hahaha
You stole the book คุณขโมยหนังสือ
This one gets tricky because the word for book already has a rising tone, so we have "question sentence endings" instead.
You stole the book? คุณขโมยหนังสือป่ะ ("pa" added at the end - sentence becomes a question)
1:25 : Thai doesn't have word stress. People have said that our language have stress in every syllable, but it's not entirely true.
9:08 : Another way to visualize how languages combine lexical and post-lexical information might be songs. Sometimes in songs, the tones change a bit. But the meaning can still be conveyed because we have context.
th-cam.com/video/4TrDsI56i24/w-d-xo.html
Try this: paste the following sentence in google translate, listen to it and compare it to 2:53 in the above link.
"ศพแรกผ่านไป ศพสองศพสามค่อยๆ ผ่านไป"
It's a bit different, right?
More fun:
th-cam.com/video/FgRK-IkJRaw/w-d-xo.html
So since we have a tonal language, our gameshows play with tones a lot. Like in the above link, at 8:04, the question is "pla(mid)/pa(low)/pa(falling)/pa(high)/pa(rising) which one of these can be eaten?" or the next one "pla(mid)/pa(low)/pa(falling)/pa(high)/pa(rising) which one of these can't eat?"
yeah, i was thinking about the questions thing. as a mandarin speaker, it just doesn't work to try to ask a question using just pitch. that's what we have the word 嗎 for lol
I was happy to see your newest post. I was so afraid you had given up on this. I just want you to know that you are appreciated. All of your posts are fascinating and I enjoy watching them so much. Thank you.
7:39 Pear is Apple. Gaggle is Google. Yangtze is Amazon?
Yangtze XD
Both are rivers
Oh my gosh, Xidnaf, you're not dead!
This is a life changing moment people!
WAIT. I SEE MY NAME IN THE PATRON LIST YAYAAAAAAAAAAAA
great to see you back xidnaf. I did a paper in linguistics in my last semester of university because of you and it was great :) thanks xidnaf
I'm interested in how tonal languages are set to music in a way different to non-tonal languages. In English, usually the lyrics are written first and then set to melody, because the lyrics provide the stress but doesn't limit the pitch. While for Chinese songs, especially Cantonese ones, musicians tend to write the melody first, and write the lyrics with tones that fit the melody afterwards. I feel that there is still a lack of scientific researches on the relationship between melody and tonal languages. How are tones related to pitch? They are relative pitches (higher or lower or rising or falling), but they aren't exactly particular pitches like a G or G-sharp.
This is such a great way to explain tonal languages. Recently I was trying to explain the idea of tones in the Chinese language to my friend and... I did a horrible job articulating the whole concept. I need to show her this video haha. Bravissimo! Great job, my friend!
It gets even more complicated with languages like Korean (which is not a tonal language by definition) that has words that come from a tonal language (in this case, Chinese) and native words. This means words that had tones originally are just said in the same way, leading to a nightmare for non-native speakers who have to judge what a word means simply based on context.
Xidnaf i get so happy when i see ur vids thanks sm pls dont stop
SENPAIIII UR BACK
5:40 I really like your illustration with the different sliders, makes it very clear
1:51 - The music staff at the bottom of the video is "My Little Pony", but the second-to-last note is wrong!! :D
Your videos get better every time. Keep up the good work! TH-cam needs linguistics channels.
In Chinese we actually create characters for post-lexical meanings like "嗎"
this character often sticks behind question sentences. and its tone is high which makes the whole sentence's tone relatively rise at the end
i really like how this channel breaks the boundaries of art style and image pixelation and is just good because the content is so insightful
I see what you did with the music notes ya bronie
Horse or gtfo
jk
But seriously, do consider worshipping horse in the future.
what do you mean?
@broto de feijão oh, got it. Thx
Hey, Xidnaf uploaded! :3
Awesome to see some content, enjoyed it as always!
Keep it up!
And people say Jesus was the only one to rise from the dead.
Kirk Navarro what
?
Ya Like Jazz? watch his latest video
But, the bible doesn't even say that? The Gospel of John describes Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after Lazarus had been dead and entombed for four days.
wow, the content of this video is actually insanely good... it doesn't dumb language down half as much as other language videos
Horse! Horse. Horse!! Horse?
I was just wondering about this the other day! Thanks, Xidnaf!
Are you doing the same thing as "Is english a sematic language?" didn't you say you really didn't like that video title?
If I said "English is a tonal language," maybe, but this one is different. I ask the question "Is it a tonal language" and then show why the answer is wrong. So I think I should be good, hopefully
Learn from your mistakes I see :)
+Xidnaf This is a scientific method of approaching a theorem: making an assumption, and then trying to prove it wrong. It's nothing wrong with it. In fact, creeds to you for tackling this problem like a real scientist! :D
Right, the answer to any question like this is supposed to be No, with the implication you'd say why.
That said, your description made me think you were going to say Yes, or that tonal languages didn't exist. Which is why I delayed on watching it.
i literally just randomly started getting your videos on my recommended but whatever they're so interesting-
I feel like most languages are tonal, but there are two types. One where tone tells the word, and one where tone tells the meaning of a sentence. If it's not one, it's the other.
These videos are utterly amazing! Keep up the good work, man!
This whole thing reminds me of calling commands for drill and ceremony, requiring a lower pitch for a prep command(forward) and a higher pitch for the command of execution(march) without either it still works but it can't be used the same way
h
hh
hhh
H
HH
HHH
Hhh
hHh
hhH
hHH
HHh
HhH
hhhhhhhh
H
ache?
aich?
yyeach
Damn this is awesome! I'm a physics person, but I love learning languages (I've dabbled in Russian, Korean, fluent in French, and learning Japanese rn). It's so cool to get a linguistics perspective on this sort of thing :)
you're confusing tone and stress.
tone is discrete. individual. unique. unrelated to the word it's part of.
stress is dependent on and relative to the word or sentence it is in.
it's best to think of tones like you think of vowels.
you can tell the difference between the words: 'heek, heck, hack, hike, hick, hook, huck, hoke, hock' even if you don't know what they all mean. but if you had the ermagerd gerzbermz girl read them aloud, you'd be lost. sure, the joke is written using vowels, but if you read them aloud, you find out pretty quickly, she's using vocalic-r to replace all vowels.
fun for a joke. a prrn in the rrss for reciting poetry.
stress in english is crazy complex. it's difficult to predict and often victim to regional dialects (emPLOYee vs employEE). not only that, but it also leaves in its wake a bunch of syllables with their vowel pronunciations altered (PHOtəgraph/phəTOgrəphy/photəGRAphic). it's not all cosmetic though, it can also change grammatical class (EXport) vs (exPORT) and mark the topic in the sentence (i HATE this movie).
focusing on that last point, chinese is a topic-prominent language (i HATE this movie --> HATE is what i feel toward this movie), so stress as a topic marker is not necessary. they do use other intonation patterns, though, which involve pitch shifts relative to the norm, and according to a predictive pattern.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)#Mandarin_Chinese
and blah.
Did you watch the whole video? Because I talked a lot about the difference between "tone" and "stress." I call stress "accent," though. Linguists seem to use both words.
Yh but stress can also be called intonation, and so can tone. Linguistics can be pretty vague or disputable sometimes
This channel has really been blowing up! Great work dude!
In my dialect of Spanish (Castillian), people speak with like NO intonation, and it really makes a difference. It's like people are constantly muttering their sentences. Some say other accents in Spain sound off and improper, but they at least have a bit of musicality to them, and they're certainly easier to understand at a party with loud music.
Víctor Osorio Hablo un poco Castillano! :p
Eso mola xD. A ver, me he metido un poco con el castellano, pero me parece que, literariamente, sí que es uno de los idiomas más bonitos que hay. Sencillamente, lo hablamos muy mal.
Víctor Osorio cuál es tu dialecto?
Yo tengo acento castellano de Madrid. Como dije, aquí la gente habla con muy poca entonación
Víctor Osorio a ver, entonación tiene, pero si lo comparas con un vasco, un gallego o un andaluz, sí que tiene poca entonación
XIDNAF YOU ARE MY HERO, never stop
Whenever a foreign word is included in your video, use an audio sample of a native speaker, their pronunciation is 100% correct
Really a nice episode, you put a lot of thought in it and it's backed by rigorous research. Keep it coming!
when I here Chinese I think about the writing system. When you say Chinese as a spoken language do you mean Mandarin?
All the chinese languages are tonal so it's ok
This was surprisingly good for something that just popped into my feed. Nice work!!! =D
why do you use the union jack to represent english?
Cause no one would recognize the flag of England.
Likewise, the choice of Chinese flag for Chinese language, when Taiwan would probably insist that their flag is correct for the mainland and not everybody in China is a native speaker of mandarin Chinese. The relation between political entities and languages could be interesting fodder for future videos.
Even the British? :P
Well The Union Jack could be used as a representation of the ANGLOSPHERE
Xidnaf fair enougj
Thanks for expanding on this subject, I was actually thinking about this quite a bit about 2 weeks ago. ♥
Horse (马) has third tone (falling and rising). Your pictures shows the second tone (rising). It could for example mean hemp (麻)。
I'm an English and Mandarin Chinese speaker and damn, you did a pretty great job explaining tonal languages that I gained knowledge about Mandarin which I haven't consciously noticed, especially with the bit about exaggerating the tone to convey post-lexical meaning! Keep it up with the great work :)
convert as a verb : conVERT
convert as a noun : CONvert
..... ????
The Milky Way it's English. If there's not at least one exception to a rule, it's not even a rule.
Is it true?
@@ryln84 exactly
@@elcidbob Ahahahah. *Let me tell you about french.*
The Milky Way whats the question?
holy cow, this was seriously deep and well-explained. good job!
Dessert vs desert
This is super cool and informative, please make more videos like this!
Produce vs. produce
man you're the best I've seriously been pondering that question at 6:30 for a long time
7:38 Parody of Apple, Google and Amazon
this is your best video imo you're getting awesome at video / audio editing and have a unique and interesting subject matter! Great work :)
男：来了？
女：来了。
男：来不？
女：来！
男：来了吗？
女：没来。
男：来了吗？
女：来了！
女：还来吗？
男：不来了，来不了了。
This is a whole pornographic story
梁浩 come!
(I don't really speak Mandarin so please explain ㅠㅠ) How are "來了嗎?" and "來了?" different? They portray the same meaning(?) But without 嗎 how do you know it's a question in spoken language?
陈独秀，你座位上有钉子吗 ？ 请给其他同学一点机会！
@@makeilaha6155 let me translate it:
man: here you come.
woman: yes, I come here.
man: let's have sex?
woman: let's go.
man: you cumming?
woman: not yet.
man: you cumming?
woman: yes, I'm cumming!
woman: one more sex?
man: I can't do it anymore now.
i’m only in chinese 2 and I doubt that my teacher would ever teach this. 谢谢你。
Just come across your video - it’s amazing. Thank you. I love your style
Pleeeeez do a video on agglutinative languages 🙏🏿
Great video! So much more to explore on this topic, too. I've always been fascinated about the "musical" aspect to language, from up-talking to regional/dialectical differences, to the "sing-songy"ness i hear in certain languages but not others. There are some melodies that I think many of us would recognize as belonging to one language: i could sing a sentence of nonsense syllables to you and you'd probably be able to say, "oh, that's obviously italian" or "oh that's how mexican spanish is parodied in cartoons" just based on the pitches.
It's not tonal because it does not distinguish the meaning of the words.
Arielscheinermann yeah it's an intonation language
He says that in the video.
don't yell at me I'm mexican
I'M MEXICAN
Make me a burrito
Your videos are linguistic art! Well done 😆👍
That wasn't tone: that was phonetical stress.
2:45 xidnaf officially takes 2+ weeks to make a single video? dedication right there.
I feel like something you could have stood to have talked about in this video is monosyllabic English words. You got into tone, accent, etc. with multisyllabic words, but, to my understanding, Chinese tones are applied to their monosyllabic words.
"Shī Shì shí shī shǐ" is a Chinese poem using only the word "shi" with different tones. Nothing even close to this can be done in English. "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is probably as close as you can get in English, and is really just a coincidence of a city being named after an animal and that animal's name being made into a verb that describes common behavior of that animal. Getting sentences that actually have meaning with the same word (with different tones) being used eight times is possible with many different words. The Chinese poem uses "shi" with different tones 92 times in a row.
Point is, if you're asking if English is a tonal language, you can quickly see that it's not, because few monosyllabic English words can truly gain different meanings by speaking them on their own. Getting into emphasizing them differently within sentences is already complicating things far too much because in Chinese, you can say a single word with one tone, like shí, and mean one thing, and say the same word with a different tone, like shī, and have a completely different meaning.
Interesting video, but I think it would have made more sense to do pretty much the same video with a different title, because you really just examined how tone and emphasis can convey meaning in English.
This was a really cool video! Can't wait for more!
Finally^^
I don't REALLY care about this subject, but as a TH-camr myself, I applaud you for the immense work you did on this video. It's insane!
Yay Xidnaf uploaded a video, 2016 is going to be a good year; you wouldn't believe the messed up dream I had... It had Americans elect an intellectually handicapped geriatric to the white house and tear themselves to pieces; I need to stop watching weird conspiracy videos on youtube before I go to sleep.
Trump is a strategic genius, that's why he was even able to win the election despite having all the media and so on against him. He knows how to manipulate the game to his will.
Be honest with yourself; he's just Putin's little bitch... His Russian sugar daddy got him a country to ruin because Trump's actually that dumb. (LOL, He's the only person in history to bankrupt a casino, at a time when all his competitors had record profits.)
So, if you are proud of being team Putin, and want USA to have a future as a third world s*** hole, just be honest and say so. I know Trump is a compulsive liar, but, your Russian sugar daddy doesn't demand that all the little Trumpets do that, yet.
Holy Sh*t! My boi Xidnaf is back!
Orange Boy DID YOU JUST ASSUME HIS GENDER
Cool Cool you Said his
Բարև
8:51 Surprised there was no mention about how certain languages do not rely on tone to convey certain post-lexical information like the "focus". For example, in English, we'd answer the two questions "Are you hungry or not?" and "Which of you is hungry" with "I'm *_hungry._***" and "*_I'm_* hungry." respectively. On the other hand, in Japanese, whether you or the hunger is the focus of the sentence is determined by a modifier (which sort of functions like an English linking verb). So the two English responses would translate to "Onaka wa akimashta." and "Onaka ga akimashta."
no it is not, next question
Olga Svenselts Actually as a native English speaker, I can say that intonation can be important and can even reverse the meaning of a word.
Oh, _sure_.
very good video,as always,keep up the good work!
Great vid' Xidnaf!
At 1:00 you're not only using pitch to emphasize the words so much as using *stress* (saying those words louder than the others) which is a different concept. You even elongate those words to add further emphasis, further confusing things, and then add the false statement "and the *only* difference between them is the tone I said them in". Horrible.