Re: tonal languages

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 05:24:03PM -0500, Douglas Koller, Latin & French wrote:
[snip]
> As H.S. pointed out, Hokkien makes this look like a day at the beach.
> Here are the basics:
>
> Tones 1 (44) and 5 (24) become tone 7 (33)
> Tone 2 (52) becomes tone 1 (44)
> Tone 3 (21) and tone 4 (32glottal stop) become tone 2 (52no glottal stop)
> Tone 7 (33) and tone 8 (43glottal stop) become tone 3 (31no glottal stop)
> Tone 4 (32clipped) becomes tone 8 (43clipped)
> Tone 8 (43clipped) becomes tone 4 (32clipped)
>
> You sandhi virtually *every*thing except the last syllable in nouns
> and the last syllable of phrases.
Aha! That explains a lot. :-) As a native speaker, this "default sandhi"
is sorta like a tonal phrase-grouping to me. I'm almost semi-consciously
sandhi'ing because in my mind it is part of a larger whole.

> Natch, there are exceptions. "Ki3", "to go", should morph into "ki2",
> but this is usually realized as "ki1" ("ki1si2" = "drop dead"). "Lai5",
> "to come", and "beh4", "to want", operate similarly. Too, these sandhi
> rules may vary in different varieties of Hokkien (like I think in Tainan
> tone 5 (24)  becomes tone 3 (21), not 7 (33), or something like that).
> H.S.'s Hokkien may look considerably different.
[snip]

Indeed it's considerably different. For one thing, tone 3 usually sandhi's
into tone 1, not tone 2. Actually, now that I think of it, there appears
to be no fixed pattern: hi3 (show/movie) + tai5 (stage) --> hi1tai5
(cinema);  however, gong3 (foolish) + kia~2 (child) --> gong3kia~2 (no
sandhi!). Perhaps it's just dependent on context. Also, tone 2 in my
idiolect is (35) not (52), so this may be a result of euphonic change
based on this different tone shape.

Oh yes, and I just noticed that tone 7 and tone 3 are identical in my
idiolect. Or perhaps I'm failing to notice the difference; it might
explain some of the "inconsistent" sandhi's that I'm seeing. Hmm actually,
now that I think about it... it *might* be that my idiolect has lost tone
7, and some tone 7 syllables (including the ones sandhi'd into tone 7) may
have been reallocated to tone 1 and others to tone 3. This may be why I'm
getting a strange sandhi rules here.

So maybe, in hopes of clearing up (some of) the confusion, here's my
attempt to map Taiwanese tone numbers to my idiolect's tones:

Tone 1 = 33
Tone 2 = 35 (pronouncing this as 52 marks you out as a Taiwanese foreigner
        :-P)
Tone 3 = 21 or 11
Tone 4 = 44 (clipped)
Tone 5 = 13
Tone 7 = 33 (apparently the same as tone 1?)
Tone 8 = 11 (clipped)

At least for me, the distance between 1 and 5 is roughly a diminished 5th
to a perfect 5th (if you have a piano, you can try this out). 2 is roughly
a semitone above 1, and 3 is between a whole tone and a minor 3rd above 1
and 2. The 4 in tone 4 is very close to 3, maybe less than a semitone
above it (it's hard to tell 'cos it's a clipped tone, which is very
short). 5 is a whole tone to minor third above 3.

Of course, the exact pitches vary during conversation; but very
approximately, you can say 1=middle C, 2=C-sharp, 3=E or E-flat, 4 is E,
and 5 is F-sharp or G. Obviously, these pitches are transposed depending
on the person, but the relative pitch differences are roughly the same.
The large difference between 3 and 5 is why I designate tone 1 as 33
instead of 44.  But I suspect 33 and 44 are homotones for the tone 1
"toneme", if I may borrow the phone/phoneme model. Also, tone 5 almost
definitely ends at the same pitch as tone 1.

So there you have it. The Hokkien I speak in my hometown consists of these
tones, plus a few sound changes (such as mutation of some initial g's:
gua2 ("I") --> wa2; jit4ge1 ("this one") --> ji4le1; li2 ("you") --> lu2).
Singaporean Hokkien is quite similar to my idiolect, although they appear
to have (mostly) kept tone 2 as 52 instead of 35. 35 for tone 2 appears to
be a distinguishing feature in the Hokkien spoken in the northern parts of
the Malaysian peninsular. This difference is very prominent to me, because
I remember when I was young, and heard somebody from East Malaysia
speaking Hokkien, but I could NOT understand what they were saying because
of the slightly different vocabulary, and because their tone 2 was 52 not
the 35 that I was used to.


T

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