How many tones in english

As I have said many times, I am far from the sharpest tool in the shed. Tod Daniels toddaniels at gmail dot com. I do agree,Tod,with all that. Westerners must first fine-tune their ears and learn to spot the subtle differences their linguistic culture did not condition them to stress.

And cadence is important too,but that is the case with most languages,I guess. So the psy factor is essential here. Cadence is another important factor when you speak thai. You pretty much need to bust out with a complete sentence using the correct musical lilt thaiz say it. Still, thanx for the comment…. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I was otherwise engaged…. Well,Tod,my experience has taught me just the opposite of what you state at the end of your post:I found from early on that Thai people will tend to guess what a farang is trying to say if the music is right albeit with wrong words and will have difficulty making sense of the opposite:wrong music but right words.

Thais in general will not think the mistake lies with the tone and will not try to mend it by replacing it,which is quite amazing to us farang s in general. This post was mostly designed to show we most definitely do have all 5 of the tones used in thai in english and use them all every single day.. Our ears are trained to listen for tones in english NOT in thai.

While correct intonation is pretty high on the list of things a foreigner hasta do to be understood when speaking thai, it is far more important we nail vowel lengths in thai than intonation. I am of the mind that if a foreign speaker of thai nails just the falling and rising tones in thai they will be understood.

They have a MUCH harder time understanding you if you massacre the vowel length.. The former requires not only the correct pronunciation of the word but also the correct tone to convey an actual meaning, while the latter uses tone as a way to enhance meaning. With English you can get your point across perfectly fine without any tone whatsoever, albeit in a very boring way, but this is absolutely not true for Asian languages requiring multiple tones which is why theyre so hard to master.

I had a hunch it was possible to take a different perspective on Thai tones and this goes a long way toward that vision. It gives insight into how they Thais pronounce their own language. When you speak more than 1 language, you are more aware of differences. Your ears are trained to hear the different sounds and this is an advantage. Students who are musician, sing, play or just love music is mastered the Thai tones surprisingly well.

As far as being born, bred, educated and lived in Thailand. English has a small degree of pitch accenting but not much and so it is generally NOT considered pitch accented. Japanese has more pitch accenting, and Spanish and Russian even more than that. Pitch accenting means that the stress on the vowel actually carries important phonemic meaning.

Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese are amongst the most well-known tonal languages used today; however, the languages with the most tones are found in West Africa and the Americas. Chinese Chinese is by far the most widely spoken tonal language, though perhaps it should be noted that Chinese itself subdivides into hundreds of local languages and dialects, not all of which e.

How embarrassing! Now, my brother retorted to these commenters by pointing out that English does have words that look the same, but based on the emphasis or stress, the word changes completely accent just to point out emphasis :. I think I fall on the side of the debate that strictly speaking, tonal languages are unique, and English is not one of them.

Some readers mentioned Swedish as being a tonal language, is that true? Build vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and more with Transparent Language Online. Available anytime, anywhere, on any device. Malachi Rempen is an American filmmaker, author, photographer, and cartoonist. Swedish does have tones, but it is not a tonal language. It is a pitch accented language.

Pitch accent is a much simpler system, as: the potentially distinctive tones are restricted to one or two syllables within a word. That contrasts with fully-tonal languages like Standard Chinese in which each syllable can have an independent tone.