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From: erickson@Hawaii.Edu (Blaine Erickson)
Subject: Re: "pitch accent" vs. "tone"
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Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 01:06:58 GMT
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alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) wrote:

>Tone is a phenomenon of syllables;

In Taiwanese and in the Wu languages, tone is very much a word-level
phenomenon.  Although individual syllables have their tones, tones go
over entire polysyllabic words, not syllable-by-syllable.

>in languages such as Mandarin, in which there are a very large
>number of monosyllabic words,

Actually, it is a myth that Mandarin is primarily a monosyllabic
language.  Please see John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language:  Fact and
Fantasy" for an excellent debunking.

>Languages such as Thai and Hausa have large numbers
>of multiple-syllable words, with tone assignments for different
>syllables.

The same is true for Taiwanese Mandarin and many other Chinese
languages.  To cite an example, there are three Cantonese words that
can be written, *without* tones, as _yatbun_.  Adding Yale tone
notation (adapted for email), we get _ya-tbun_ "one half," _ya-tbu/n_
"one book," and _yahtbu/n_ "Japan."  (Tones: - = high level; / = mid
rising; h = low (in this case, low level); and no mark = mid level.) 
There are plenty of other examples.

Unlike most Chinese languages, Beijing/Northwestern Mandarin has
what's called "neutral" tone.  Basically, grammatical morphemes have
no tone.  This tone loss has gone further in some areas, where tone is
only manifest on accented words within a sentence.  Furthermore, this
may represent a midway point between a tonal and a non-tonal language,
and people are starting to talk about tonoexodus in Northwestern
Mandarin.

> it appears that tone is at the word level, but this is misleading.

See above.

Blaine Erickson
erickson@hawaii.edu

