Tones in dialects.

[roddy]

Here's something to put you off if you're thinking about learning a bit of the local 话

I'd always known that different dialects (or languages, or accents, or whatever you want to call them) dealt with tone differently. Now, in Mandarin, at least the tones are fairly distinguishable. You've got one that's high and level (5-5-5, with 5 being a high-pitch, one that rises from 3-5,one that goes down and then up again (2-1-4) and one that drops from 4 to 1. (or that's what the book on my lap says anyway).

What I didn't realise is that in some dialects the tones are nowhere near that clear. For example, Kaifeng residents need to distinguish between one tone that goes 4-1, and another that goes 3-1. Meanwhile, the poor sods in Xi'an are selling their mothers and buying horses by mistake, because they're mishearing ma(3-1) as ma(4-2).

Good luck . . .

Roddy

[Quest]

6 tones of cantonese:

私(55)史(35)试(33)时(21)市(23)事(22)

the numbers indicate their pitch level. e.g. 35 = rising from level 3 to level 5.

[wix]

Taiwanese has seven tones. The second and sixth tones were considered near enough to identical and merged. Two of the tones are short sounds (in linguistic terms they have a glottal stop or something like that).

Sorry if I don't use numbers but I will describe them.

1. High flat tone

2. Falling tone starting from the level of the first tone

3. Falling tone starting from the level of the fifth tone

4. Short sound same tone as the first

5. Mid flat tone

7. Falling and rising tone

8. short tone rising and starting from the same level as the fourth tone.

I don't think the tones themselves are particularly difficult. The 4th and 8th tones are quite distinct leaving another five which aren't too difficult.

The most difficult thing is the tonal changes. Once the words are put into a sentence the tones will change in most cases. This is according to set rules, but it still takes a long time to wrap your head around the idea.

[TSkillet]

6 tones for Cantonese? I've heard everything from 6 to 11 (not that I'd know - I learned my Cantonese at home AND while I'm almost fluent with usage and vocabulary, my accent and tones suck so every cab driver thinks I'm singaporian or filipino)

[Guest AliBaba]

6 tones for Cantonese? I've heard everything from 6 to 11

Well, the first tone (high tone) could be separated out into a plain old high tone vs. a high falling tone. (Though this distinction has mostly disappeared, except for a few words). Then there's three "stop tones" (ru sheng) which are identical to tones 1, 3, and 6 listed above, but some people classify them separately for historical linguistics reasons. Then occasionally, especially in HK Cantonese the stop tone on the end of a word gets changed into something like a second tone, but I guess you could technically call it a separate tone since it still belongs to the class of ru sheng. I guess that's 11 tones. Or maybe there's another way to come up with that number.

(not that I'd know - I learned my Cantonese at home AND while I'm almost fluent with usage and vocabulary, my accent and tones suck so every cab driver thinks I'm singaporian or filipino)

hahha, I'm Hakka from Malaysia and I always get mistaken for a mainlander by HK people. By the end of my stay in HK, I didn't have that problem, but I've been away for too long, so now my natural accent has reasserted itself.