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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Spanish accent marks (Re: Chinese romanization systems (was H and digraphs thereof))
Message-ID: <CynxLH.7o9@inter.NL.net>
Organization: /etc/organization
References: <CyG5K9.ICx@inter.NL.net> <CyIDMA.Gow@inter.NL.net> <CyLtoI.I29@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <397irt$14e@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU>
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 1994 23:08:04 GMT
Lines: 44

In article <397irt$14e@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU>,
Hung J Lu <hlu@GAS.UUG.Arizona.EDU> wrote:
>Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) wrote:
>
>: <aun "yet, even, but"	au'n "still, yet"
>
>: Are these two homophones?  I've always pronounced the first as [awn]
>: and the second as [a'un].
>
>Probably it's just the tonality creeping in there.

No, in the case of au'n/aun it's also a different
pronunciation, as Ivan says.  The term "homophones"
was a bad choice on my part: "homographs" would have been 
better.

>For instance, the words el (the) and e'l (he) are
>supposed to be homophones, but in practice the word
>el (the) is pronounced with a low (or low-falling)
>tone, whereas e'l (he) is pronounced with a high-falling
>tone. Similarly, the [un] in aun is pronounced usually
>with a high-leveled tone, but in au'n is pronounced
>with a high-falling tone. Spanish is not exactly a
>toneless language. All the articles el, la, los, las
>are pronounced with low (or low-falling) tones in
>real speech. If you take away the tones, you get
>Mr. Robot's voice.  :-)
>

I've been speaking Spanish all my life, and somehow I never
thought I was speaking a tone language.... But you're right,
every language has variations in tone as well as stress.
What differs is their use and their function within the language.
In Spanish, tone is not used to distinguish morphemes.  Its
formal use is mainly syntactic (question/declarative/imperative,
where it is "written" as ?, ., or !).  The difference between
stressed and unstressed words also has a tonal component, but
it's subordinate to the stress component.  Now for Italian,
I'm not so sure...:-)

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
