{"id":23679,"date":"2024-06-13T16:01:37","date_gmt":"2024-06-13T14:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/minor-and-major-pitfalls-in-tonal-languages\/"},"modified":"2024-09-04T09:48:34","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T07:48:34","slug":"minor-and-major-pitfalls-in-tonal-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/minor-and-major-pitfalls-in-tonal-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Minor and major pitfalls in tonal languages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On average, two out of three languages in the world are tonal languages. This means that the pitch and its contour often determine the meaning of the spoken word. These \u201ctonemes\u201d present one of the greatest barriers for anyone who wants to learn a tonal language but comes from a completely different linguistic background. Some examples of the misunderstandings that can occur are described below.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The fact that the German word for \u201ctechnical jargon\u201d is \u201cFachchinesisch,\u201d which translates literally as \u201ctechnical Chinese,\u201d reflects the perception that Chinese is particularly difficult for Europeans to learn. In addition to the unfamiliar script, it is the different tones that language students fear in particular. The most widely spoken language in the world has four different pitch contours (plus a neutral tone), and those who fail to hit the right tone can end up confusing their Chinese counterparts. Want some examples? Depending on the emphasis, \u201cfei\u201d can mean either \u201cflying,\u201d \u201cfat,\u201d \u201cbandit,\u201d or \u201cgarbage.\u201d The term \u201cguo\u201d can be pronounced differently to mean \u201cpot,\u201d \u201cland,\u201d \u201cfruit,\u201d or \u201cpass by.\u201d However, anyone who now feels like abandoning their plans to learn Chinese for good can rest assured: the Chinese\u2014like all speakers of tonal languages\u2014are accustomed to hearing mistakes and have no difficulty interpreting even incorrectly intoned words correctly in context.<\/p>\n\n

When the governor is a lady: Misunderstandings in Vietnam<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Perhaps you feel learning Chinese is too easy? <\/a>Fancy a tougher challenge? The Vietnamese language distinguishes between no less than six pitch contours: high to mid and level, high to mid and rising, low and falling, falling and glottalized, falling and rising as well as checked and rising. The fourth tone has a special trick up its sleeve for language students: it also includes a glottal stop, the unvoiced glottal stop. As in Chinese, the different tonemes in Vietnamese also have striking differences in meaning. Depending on the pitch contour, the small word \u201cba,\u201d for example, is translated as \u201cthree,\u201d \u201cgovernor,\u201d \u201clady,\u201d \u201clife,\u201d \u201chistory,\u201d or \u201crest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Hip or mother-in-law\u2014uncertainty in North America<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The many languages and dialects of the Native Americans take \u201cdifficult to learn\u201d to a whole new level. It is no coincidence, for example, that the USA used the Navajo language as the basis for the unbreakable encryption of its radio communications during the Pacific War. Native Americans are also very familiar with tonal languages, such as the Apache languages. They distinguish between high, low, ascending and descending tones, which certainly have the potential to create huge misunderstandings. Get the tone wrong here and you might very well confuse \u201cbuckskin\u201d with \u201cbread,\u201d \u201cfeces\u201d with \u201cbeaver,\u201d or \u201chip\u201d with \u201cmother-in-law.\u201d We\u2019ll leave it to you to decide which misinterpretation might have the most unpleasant consequences.<\/p>\n\n

A wretched louse? Tonal languages can also be found in Scandinavia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Tonal languages also exist in Europe. There are dialects in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish that make a distinction between different pitch contours. Compared to Chinese, however, these are far more manageable because there are only two. In certain Norwegian dialects, the words for \u201cfarmer\u201d and \u201cbean,\u201d for example, can only be distinguished by their pitch, as can those for \u201clouse\u201d and \u201cwretched.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

How much does it hurt? Lithuanian as a tonal language<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Here\u2019s another example from Europe: The Lithuanian language distinguishes between the short tone, the sudden, sharp, or rough tone, and the glide tone. In many cases, only related adjectives and nouns\u2014such as \u201cliquid\u201d and \u201cfluid\u201d\u2014are distinguished in this way. However, the tonemes can also introduce bigger changes in meaning, for example, between \u201cto step\u201d and \u201cto remember.\u201d The phenomenon is particularly common when it comes to expressing the intensity of a sensation. In the case of the exclamation \u201cai,\u201d for example, which is used to express pain, the pitch contour defines whether the pain is chronic or brief and acute. However, since the length of the spoken syllable is also important, non-native speakers will probably make themselves understood perfectly well in an emergency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On average, two out of three languages in the world are tonal languages. This means that the pitch and its contour often determine the meaning of the spoken word. These \u201ctonemes\u201d present one of the greatest barriers for anyone who wants to learn a tonal language but comes from a completely different linguistic background. Some\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":18461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1195,879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-languages-en-gb","category-unkategorisiert-en-gb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23680,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23679\/revisions\/23680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.act-translations.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}