The Importance of Tones for Understanding

[Oswulf]

Whilst Thai is a tonal language, the tones are not necessary for understanding.  This is evinced by:

 

(a) The ability to understand whispered Thai.

 

(b) The ability readily to understand written Thai using IPA, but eliminating all tone marks.

 

Since I'm curious about tonogenesis in Tai languages, I was wondering how important tones are for understanding in Chinese languages (my working hypothesis being that Tai acquired its tone system from neighbouring Chinese languages).

 

So, my question is, can Chinese languages be easily understood when presented without tones?

 

Thanks

[imron]

57 minutes ago, Oswulf said:

So, my question is, can Chinese languages be easily understood when presented without tones?

 

N prblm. Jst lk nglsh cn b ndrstd wtht vwls.

[roddy]

xcpt rmbr y hv t d t n rl tm, y cnt jst tk yr tm vr t lk ths. whl yr drvng tx r smthng.

 

Language be redundant always. I take tense and number and preposition, you understand, imron understand, no big problem. You read 1984? Doubleplusgood. Oceanian poetry presumably dull. Idea language feature necessary understanding flawed. Doublepluswelcome site!

[Lu]

3 hours ago, Oswulf said:

So, my question is, can Chinese languages be easily understood when presented without tones?

I can only speak for Mandarin, which can generally be understood without, or with the wrong, tones, but not easily.

 

I suspect you're not the first person to ask this question, and that there is quite some research on it already. Have you looked for it yet, and what do others say?

[Xiao Kui]

My Thai teacher seems to think the tones are pretty important. Maybe I should educate her.

[abcdefg]

4 hours ago, Oswulf said:

So, my question is, can Chinese languages be easily understood when presented without tones?

 

Short answer is no. Tones are essential to understanding.

[Mati1]

4 hours ago, Xiao Kui said:

My Thai teacher seems to think the tones are pretty important. Maybe I should educate her.

Disscuss it with your teacher in Thai, without using tones. If she answers in a meaningful way you know she understands you, contradicting herself

 

From my very limited outside point of view, depending on the sentence / discussion, Chinese can be difficult enough with the correct tones. However, I guess in general it is easier to understand after removing the tones, compared to using the right tones but unusual words from the dictionary, which easily happens to learners because the dictionary is "too good / big" haha.

[Shelley]

This topic here asked a similar question and has some useful content .https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/54845-do-you-listen-to-the-tones-or-do-you-understand-by-context/?tab=comments#comment-422995

[davoosh]

I think that while every day conversation can be understood without tones, this is largely due to context and predictable phrasing of certain things. Try the news without tones? Or reading a randomly selected piece of text? I think intelligibility would go down significantly. I think tones are and should be taught as an internal part of Chinese phonology, which they are. It's like saying English can be understood using only 5 vowels, yes possibly, but that doesnt make it natural or a way that learners should emulate. 

[HuayangAcademy]

Tones are very important when learning Chinese, We have recently enrolled students who chose not to focus on tones in their previous study and are having a hard time going back to basics. 

Roddy made a great point above tones and pronunciation are so important, think about when you meet a local Chinese with understandable English compared with  well pronounced English

[Zbigniew]

On 9/25/2017 at 6:23 AM, Oswulf said:

Whilst Thai is a tonal language, the tones are not necessary for understanding.  This is evinced by:

 

(a) The ability to understand whispered Thai.

 

I've both heard and produced intelligible whispering in Mandarin on numerous occasions. The tones can still be indicated to some extent when you're whispering. Do Chinese speakers whisper less in general than speakers of Thai or English? You'd expect so, if Mandarin whispering was relatively less intelligible. Sung Mandarin is potentially more ambiguous than whispered, and yet people apparently understand singing without any great difficulty.

On 9/25/2017 at 6:23 AM, Oswulf said:

(b) The ability readily to understand written Thai using IPA, but eliminating all tone marks.

 

I can't see any reason why Mandarin can't be intelligible when written in the IPA, as long as you understand the IPA; toneless Pinyin is largely intelligible, as long as there is enough context and the vocab isn't too out of the ordinary.

[rossg]

I say this with your best interest in mind, so don't think I'm just being mean: if you write extensively about some perceived superfluous nature of tones people will laugh at you -- especially those who speak the language(s). And, it is, in a sense, downright disrespectful to thousands of years of culture and development to knowingly disregard tones or downplay their importance. The tones ARE the language. It's not something extra for clarification. It's possible that the person who told you otherwise was trying to flaunt his/her intelligence and/or demonstrate fluency by suggesting an ability to understand anything

[Flickserve]

On 25/09/2017 at 1:23 PM, Oswulf said:

my question is, can Chinese languages be easily understood when presented without tones?

 

Are you planning on learning Chinese?