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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
For example, in most Norwegian dialects, the word bønder (farmers) is pronounced with tone 1, while tone 2 is used when pronouncing bønner (beans or prayers). Differences in spelling occasionally let readers distinguish written words, but most minimal pairs are written alike.
Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways. [1] Tonal languages, characterized by their use of pitch to affect meaning, appear all over the world, especially in the Niger-Congo language family of Africa, and the Sino-Tibetan language family of East Asia, [2] as well as other East Asian languages such as Kra-Dai, and Papuan languages.
For example, in This is fun, this is is at pitch 2, and fun starts at level 3 and glides down to level 1. But if the last prominent syllable is not the last syllable of the utterance, the pitch fall-off is a step. For example, in That can be frustrating, That can be has pitch 2, frus-has level 3, and both syllables of -trating have pitch 1. [22]
Authors create tone through the use of various other literary elements, such as diction or word choice; syntax, the grammatical arrangement of words in a text for effect; imagery, or vivid appeals to the senses; details, facts that are included or omitted; and figurative language, the comparison of seemingly unrelated things for sub-textual ...
When a tone 3 occurs before another tone 3, however, it changes into tone 2 (a rising tone), and when it occurs before any of the other tones, it is pronounced as a low falling tone with no rise at the end. An example occurs in the common greeting 你好 nǐ hǎo (with two words containing underlying tone 3), which is in practice pronounced ní ...
Different analyses may treat final-accented (odaka) words and unaccented (heiban) words as identical and only distinguishable by a following particle, or phonetically contrastive and potentially phonemic based on how high a "high" tone actually is (see the Tertiary pitch subsection below). And the phonetic tones are never truly stable, but ...
So for example in the word á-ma-lamúla 'he usually rules' in the example illustrated above, the tone of the first syllable á is pronounced a little higher than the tone of the second tone mú. Thus generally speaking the highest tone in a sentence is the first one.