Talk:Intonation

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Intonation in Language and Intonation in Music[edit]

I believe this article should be split into Intonation (language) and Intonation (music). These two are related, but seperate things entirely. There is enough information on both topics for two seperate articles. I suggest a disambig. Kntrabssi 07:54, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, not getting much feedback, are you? I support the split. There isn't much in common between the two topics, so that people directed here for one won't likely be interested in the other. kwami 01:26, 24 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

- I don't want to split it just yet, I will perhaps wait for one or two more "go ahead's" before I go ahead. Kntrabssi 04:23, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  go ahead :) —Felix the Cassowary 04:44, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  Totally agree on the split. There's a relation between the topics, certainly, but there is more than enough of a distinction between the two to make a split an aid to the reader.--66.43.209.24 06:39, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  One more "go ahead" for a split. It will help to categorize articles properly --GreyCat 03:27, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  I guess my "go ahead" entitles me to carry out the split. (I feel like doing something and most of the other articles in the split category are confusing.) Neonumbers 10:43, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

difference between tone and intonation[edit]

If I understand correctly, linguists distinguish between "tone" and "intonation", saying that Mandarin and Vietnamese have "tones", whereas English has intonation rather than tone. I would hope that an article on this topic would explain all that. I am not competent to write such a thing; I have only a rudimentary notion of what they're talking about; I know it when I see it, but I can explain it fluently. -- Mike Hardy

I'm not too sure myself, however, the article does say "Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance to convey surprise and irony or to change a sentence from a statement to a question." English fits the bill. On the other hand, for Chinese, a tonal language, tones are more like consonants or vowels since it almost always changes one word to a completely unrelated word. E.g. ma (tone 1) = mother, ma (tone 3) = horse in Chinese, according to Chinese language. Japanese is classified as an intonational language rather than a tonal language, but it actually has characteristics of both: hashi (falling tone) = bridge, hashi (rising tone) = edge -- however, tones can change, switch or cease to exist when going from one Japanese dialect to another, making it less significant than, say, consonants or vowels. --69.214.227.51 08:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think that Japanese would be classified as a pitch based language, rather than a tonal. Swedish and Norwegian also has a few words that differ in meaning depending on which syllable is stressed.

The word "tone" is generally used when every syllable, or every word (depending on the language) has a specific tone, whereas "pitch accent" is generally used when the tone is on a specific syllable within the word, just as English stress on on a specific syllable. The difference, of course, is not alway clear cut, just as the difference between pitch and stress is not always clear cut. kwami 11:39, 26 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I might be wrong, but I think that the tones of tonal languages are more important to convey the exact meaning, when you ignore the correct tones in a Cantonese or Mandarin sentence, you would likely create huge misunderstanding, while using the wrong pitch in Swedish or Japanese generally would get you understood, but reveal you as a foreigner.

Yes, but it's a matter of degree. Chinese is much more heavily reliant on tone than Japanese. Many African languages are inbetween: most newspapers don't bother with tone, but that makes reading so difficult that people are now rethinking that policy. Messing up the pitch accent in Japanese is like mixing up stress in English - you'll generally be understood, but sometimes will simply be unintelligible. kwami 02:10, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]