Tone (linguistics)
As a tonal language, Tonalsprache or tonal language refers to a language that goes along with a change in the pitch or the Tonverlaufs in a syllable is usually a change in the meaning of the corresponding word (or morpheme ). Tonal languages are the most common of all languages spoken worldwide today, but do not include the majority of all the speakers. The tonal languages we offer are the following languages:
- Chinese languages such as Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese
- Tai - Kadai languages , such as Thai and Lao
- Hmong - Mien languages
- Vietnamese, an Austro- Asiatic language
- Tsat, an Austronesian language
- Afro-Asiatic languages , such as Hausa in West Africa
- Many Niger - Congo languages , such as Yoruba and Igbo in West Africa and Xhosa in South Africa
- Nilo-Saharan languages, for example Kanuri in West Africa
- Khoisan languages in southern Africa
- Many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, for example, the Apache languages
- To some extent: Indo-European languages , such as Punjabi, Greek in its original pronunciation, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Swedish, some of Southern Denmark dialects, the South Slavic languages Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian, Limburg and the Ripuarian dialects of German.
Languages , which alone use intonation to highlight grammatical structures or parts of a sentence (for example, voice raising at the end of an interrogative sentence in German ), are not tonal languages ( in tonal languages , however, this feature may also occur ). In tonal languages tone belongs firmly to the word (or morpheme ) and there are words of very different importance, which are sounding differ only by the Tonverlauf or pitch. Depending on the language, the sound plays a more or less important role in the grammar.
Basically, there are two or three types of tone languages :
- Registertonsprachen, with constant pitch, for example, consistently high or consistently low
- Konturtonsprachen, with different pitch contours, eg increasing
- Tonakzentsprachen ( improper tone languages ), are where words (or morphemes ) are distinguished by different emphasis and the emphasis not (alone) is realized by a print accent, but by a different pitch or a different Tonverlauf
Of course, there are also combinations thereof. The tonal languages of Europe belong to the Tonakzentsprachen and use both tonal and non - tonal syllables.
Tones in standard Chinese
Main article: tones of standard Chinese
The high Chinese ( "Mandarin", Pǔtōnghuà ) belongs to the Konturtonsprachen. There are four or five tones ( the fifth is often not counted as a sound for themselves, but a relatively arbitrary definition ):
The tones are thereby divided as follows:
The neutral ( 5 ) audio playback is usually not counted:
The neutral tone is common in polysyllabic words in which the second syllable is less pronounced than the first. So妈妈is spoken as a mom, it occurs here, the neutral tone on the second syllable, although both represent the same character.
Tones can also interact with each other (so-called Tonsandhi ). For example, in standard Chinese spoken no two syllables with the third tone of succession. Put two syllables with the third tone to each other, so the first syllable is pronounced in the second tone. Other languages have generally far more complex interaction rules.
Because it is here to interactions in particular sound environments can be the " fifth tone " is not regarded as an independent tonal phoneme ( toners ) as the other four tones. It is a Alloton.
Clay molds
The Chinese linguist Zhao Yuanren has developed a handy system for listing of the notes. He divided the pitch into five levels, with 5 being the highest and 1 the lowest tone is. The change in tone can be represented by a concatenation of the numbers. For high Chinese to write therefore
- Second tone / 35 / rising tone
- Third tone / 214 / low falling and rising tone
- Fourth tone / 51 / high, completely falling tone
- Neutral tone / 11 / uniformly low tone
A uniform medium would sound as / 33 notes / etc. This sequence of numbers is called a clay mold.