![]() ![]() Your conclusion is not accurate, unfortunately. My conclusion is that while tones may inflect the mood or voice of the utterance, they do not inflect the meaning of the words themselves. See any hundreds to poorly done tattoos for examples of this. You might think you were reproducing it perfectly, but to someone who grew up writing Cyrillic, they'd know immediately that you were doing it wrong. But if you don't know Cyrillic at all and had to suddenly hand-write something you saw printed, you'd likely draw it instead of writing it. You're taught the ideal forms of letters. Bad handwriting can still be legible because there's a sort of target that the person is going for. The significant features can be missed without realising it. You (anyone, not you you) can be completely confident that you're reproducing something in another language, but still be doing it horribly wrong to a native speaker's ears. It's also hard to know that you are doing an exact duplication, since you may be unaccustomed to hearing the significant features. When I exactly duplicate the phrases with the teachers' tones Tl dr: Taylor might be right eventually, but he's not right yet. Length and phonation distinctions are also important. The point is, the tones still very much matter, even if we're only looking at the pitch, but we should definitely not be only looking at the pitch. In this sort of utterance the other features (phonation, length) aren't present in a meaningful way. With it it's high (tone 3), without it it's low (tone 2). That : looking thing on လိုး marks the high tone. Changing the pitch of a syllable is not a small thing. However, despite all these other things that distinguish tone category, pitch is still incredibly important. This is why you can still whisper in Mandarin and be completely understood the non-pitch features get emphasised in ways that allow everyone to still understand the words. Many tonal languages have secondary features on the tones aside from just pitch. And Burmese is in no way unique in this regard. It's also very short.Īs you can see, there's a lot going on with the tones that isn't just pitch height. Tone four has a glottal stop at the end, and this is also a feature of the category. Someone clearly pronouncing "ear" /na/ which is a third tone word will likely have some audible breathiness to the word. Tone three also has some breathiness to it in certain contexts. Not all languages with lexical tone are like this, but many are. It doesn't matter so long as it starts high. In Burmese the important feature about whether something is high or low is where the syllable begins, not where it ends. Tone three is high, but longer than tone 1. It's normal voice (not creaky, not breathy). The end of the syllable has a constricted glottis that it not a sudden stop but is audibly there. Tone one is glottalised (ˀ), also referred to as creaky. These each have their own set of features: Burmese is one of the better examples of that. In most tonal languages in Southeast Asia, pitch is never the only feature of the tone categories. The four tones only cover 2 pitch heights, keeping in mind that the onset of the syllable is the important part. how much they carry the meaning of the sentence) is arguably lower than it is in a language like Thai or Mandarin. However if you're thinking "tone" means pitch only then it's less important.įunctional load of lexical tones (i.e. ![]() On the whole how important is tone in Burmese and is it becoming less important as the author seems to be predicting? The author seems to be predicting the eventual collapse of the Burmese tonal system in the near future, at least that is my interpretation of his words. Interestingly it appears that quote was written in 1920, almost 100 years ago, which I guess is a reasonably long time in terms of the development of a language, especially phonologically. If I have understood correctly that quote seems to be implying that the way Burmese is spoken is starting to resemble a non-tonal language and Burmese speakers vary their intonation and speech rhythm far more than would be typical of most tonal languages. ![]() Taylor concluded that "conversational rhythm and euphonic intonation possess importance" not found in related tonal languages and that "its tonal system is now in an advanced state of decay. I was reading the Wikipedia article about Burmese, and I noticed there is a quote on there from a linguistic about the situation with Burmese tones that reads ![]()
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