Sing like you mean it! - the Linguistics of Tonal Languages
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2024
- It takes more than vowels and consonants to speak a tonal language. You need musical pieces called "tonemes" to make meaning. Here's how tones work.
This animated video tours the linguistics of tonality - how some languages pay attention to changes in pitch. Learn the basics of tonemes. Think about the difference between register tones and contour tones. Meet some singsongy examples, including the dreaded six tones of Cantonese!
Animation, art and audio by NativLang
Photos from morguefile.com
Music: Tikopia by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Many years ago A friend of mine was studying Mandarin. One night we went to a very nice Chinese restaurants in Minneapolis called the Village Wok. My friend and I are both of Irish extraction-about as white as you can get. My friend, Tommy, tried to order in Mandarin to the young Asian waiter. Young man going to couple times and said I beg your pardon sir. Tommy tried again and once again the young waiter said Sir I’m sorry I don’t understand you. Tom asked the young waiter if he was using the wrong tone in Mandarin, to which the young man replied“I couldn’t tell you sir I’m from Vietnam.”
Most Chinese restaurants are Cantonese-owned in the Midwest anyway. Even though they may be able to speak Mandarin, a lot of the employees don't. In Southern California they tend to be owned by equal parts Mandarin speakers and Cantonese speakers. Keep in mind these are two entirely different languages, as different as Spanish and French. If one didn't study the other, they wouldn't understand it.
LOLLLLLLLLLL
A lot of American Born Chinese (ABC) do not speak any Mandarin at all.
MrMilanoLau that’s sad
This is quite common among Chinese born overseas, not just in the US. True, quite sad.
vietnamese words meaning with diferent tones
hai=two
hái=to gather (e.g. fruits or flowers)
hài=comedy
hải=sea
hãi= to freak out
hại=harmful
hại= make hurt/ harm
Lê Phi Hùng đã sửa
Toan DH
吊=hang
屌=fuck
Wow these are mostly sino-Vietnamese vocabularies... I actually understand it...
Toan DH yea im not learning Vietnamese
I read that perfect pitch is much more frequent among speakers of tonal languages.
Hugo Sapien wait the only guy i know with perfect pitch is chinese that’s actually pretty cool
@@akhilmadipalli3944 I don't know anybody... or at least, no one has told me. I live in the USA.
@Jaakko Lauronen Scientific American. www.scientificamerican.com/article/speaking-tonal-languages/
they've technically been practicing their entire lives
@Hugo Sapien Must be all that training.
Cantonese: What about the tones, when singing?
Mandarin: f*** the tones
Solution: always sing
@@ReCamHead pretend you're in a musical because why not
Cantonese: we just write the lyrics to follow the melody! (or vice versa)
but seriously that's what they do: Cantonese songwriters are genius lyricists, unlike Mandarin songs which mainly indeed just take a "f*** the tones" attitude
(songs in Taiwanese, when well written, also usually follow the melody; not sure about Thai or Vietnamese songs)
@@epingchris in Vietnamese tones and melody have to follow each other. you will be criticized if you sing the wrong tone in a musical contest. recently i heard a Japanese girl singing a Vietnamese song. instead of singing with a middle tone she changed it into a high tone and the meaning has changed from "many generations" (bao đời) to "to harm society" (báo đời)😂😂😂
@M. J. H. Some of my favorites are "Who do you think of when you're lonely" (當你孤單你會想起誰) sung like "Who do you want to ride when you're lonely" (當你孤單你會想騎誰), and "you are my no. 1 hit song" (你是我的主打歌) sung like "you are my piggy big brother" (你是我的豬大哥) lol
Actually, Vietnamese has 6 tones, generally: accute (sắc), grave (huyền), short bouncing (hỏi), long bouncing (ngã), dipping tone (nặng) and no tonal (ngang). Moreover, the pronounciation of these tones is different between north, south and especially central dialects :D
Glad to see a comment about Vietnamese here UwU
The last tone is not really tone but staccato
Here are the English counterparts.
Dấu Sắc = Concerned “huh?”
Dấu Huyền = Depressed “oh.”
Dấu Hỏi = “oh?” (faster pace)
Dấu Ngã = “oh?” (normal pace)
Dấu Nặng = Confused “uh-“ in a low voice
Thanks for mentioning our Dįnę́ language! :)
My people's language, Navajo, has five tones: high, low, mid, rising and falling. As a fluent, native speaker I hear them all. Though, linguists say it has only four but that is not true.
+stlouisramsfan03
exact same tone system as thai, i think
+Hollus Elsfik I think it is very similar almost.
The reason is that in linguisitcs, mid tones are often not counted as a tone but rather as the "absence of tone".
@@iikicchi I think you are right - I've seen claims that Thai only has four tones, before. But I think this has to be an idea from linguists that don't speak a tonal language. It seems to imply that words with other tones are somehow modified versions of the mid tone equivalent word, and that's just dumb.
Same with Ket. Yenisean language
hihi im learning mandarin and its funny when people make mistakes with tones. one of my classmates was talking and they said dǎ xuéshēng instead of dàxuéshēng and i seriously could not figure out why they were talking about beating up a student.
+squigoo holy shit its so funny
InfinitWorld LOL
They probably deserved it. I bet they were making fun of their language skills 👊💥
gotta love mandarin
HAHA omg i didnt realize it was that big of a jump
The interesting things is that as a native speaker of mandarin (which is a tonal language), it’s still quite hard to recognize the tone of other tonal languages (e.g. the difference between high and low tone in Cantonese)
How about the use of tone in non-tonal languages? Is it hard to understand when e.g an English speaker uses tone for emphasis or convey affect/emotion? And do you also use certain tonal characteristics to convey those aspects in Mandarin, or are tones completely reserved for semantic aspects?
@@McMxxCiV If I may reply, for me it's very easy to pick up which syllable is stressed in English and any change in intonation that could convey different meanings in a sentence.
Edit: I speak Thai. Tones are fixed and pronounced the same in any situation unless you have a local accent. If not, message is confusing or does not get across at all. In many other ways, emotions can be conveyed by speaking with different pace, intensity, pitch, selection of words, etc.
@@auraaura2417 Thanks for your reply! This is fascinating stuff. Could you explain what you mean with pitch as opposed to tone in Thai?
@@McMxxCiV I am no linguist. What I meant was when someone is using higher or lower voice and sometimes because of emotion. I guess this is common for all of us. Think of speaking of the same pattern of notes but of different octaves perhaps.
You just haven’t got enough exposure
My native language is a Bantu language called "Sango" and I lowkey didn't even realize it was tonal until someone brought it up. When you grow up with a tonal language its just so normal that you don't even think about it, I guess. (but like stop saying that we're singing)
Interesting. Does that restrain you from conveying emotions a bit?
Like for example you want to sound a word a specific expressive way, but the vowel tones forbid that?
@@Halo_Legend Not at all. In non-tonal languages, tone isn't really used that much to convey expressions so it doesn't really matter in tonal languages.
@@Halo_Legend no not that I've observed. I can equally express myself in English and Sango.
Same, ecxept im a Brazilian portuese Speaker. (Wich sounds a lot different from european portuguese, because the vowels are more open)
@@BelaCoxinha Portuguese isn't tonal. There are no tonal languages in Europe last I checked..
Just in case you want hilarity in Cantonese:
The word hɐi in different tones:
1: A vulgar word for the female reproductive system
2: "At"
6: "To be"
Japanese doesn't have tones so when they loaned hɐi6 along with other Chinese words they pronounced most of them as tone 1., and you know what happens...
Every Japanese learning classroom with teenagers or maybe even children in Hong Kong comes with a few chuckles from the back seat at the first few lessons.
And gai meaning either prostitue or chicken depending on the tone. Haha
Hana They're the exact same word (even the characters are the same) for me...
+tuxcup they ARE the same word. It's some sort of metaphor.
Yeah I accidentally said hai1 and not hai6 O.o so embarrassing...
hɐi6 hɐi2 hɐi1 or not hɐi6 hɐi2 hɐi1, that is the question.
It’s so weird to discover something so simple and yet so profound, that you have never heard of before but millions of people use in their daily lives
I speak Vietnamese and no, nobody ever considered it to be anywhere close to "singing".
When we add a tone to a vowel, we consider it to be a whole different vowel, that's how we're taught when we're young, we don't think of it as one vowel with diffrent tones we consider them different individual vowels. like e and ê are considered to be different vowels.
Bad example. The vowels e and ê are different vowels. On the other hand, e è ẻ ẽ é ẹ are the same vowel with different tones. Same with ê ề ể ễ ế ệ.
Alright you've got a point
I mean I don't really know anymore I hvaent spoken my mother tounge for 4 years now.
Oh and also, he gave an example saying 'hà' and 'há' (assuming in this case these are vietnamese words he was referring to) saying that they're the same words with diffrent tones, subtly implying they're both the same word, which is absolutely not true.
I don't know how these things fit into linquistic technicalities but at birth we're taught that they're different words rather than the same word with different "stroke thing" ontop of them. Kinda like how in french ou and où; they're two words, the only difference being that we vietnamese speakers actually "pronounce" those accent marks.
Idk, maybe he poorly explained the concept to the viewers, maybe he made the concept of tonal language into something that it's not, or maybe I'm completely missing the point he's trying to make. Either way, just let it be.
Are you a tree?
One thing that I have always wondered- How do people actually *sing* in tonal languages? Obviously the Chinese, Vietnamese, Somalians, Hausa, and so on and so forth- These people have real vocal music. But how do they sing if the notes will change the meaning?
Kalyn Lapierre That makes them both less and more intimidating, depending on context (pardon the pun). Thank you!
The tones are NOT ignored when singing! I am a Cantonese native speaker from Hong Kong. For modern songs, the lyrics writer has to write lyrics with tones following the music, or the music composer has to compose the music following the tones of the lyrics. This ensures that the lyrics do not sound strange.
For some older translated songs, for example, "Happy Birthday to You", the tones are not followed because the tone of the translated lyrics does not follow the music. Because the music restricts the tones to be used, there will be only a very limited set of word choices. It would be very difficult to translate a song into Cantonese such that both the meaning of the original lyrics is kept and tones are followed.
Tones may get flattened for some people but the contours are kept, and the high, middle or low tones can still be carefully distinguished although the difference between becomes less.
But for all Mandarin songs, the tones are really not followed. The reasons might be that: Mandarin has only 4 tones which will be hard to match so many musical notes, and their contours cannot match music tones well. For ecample, the 3rd tone (go down first and then up), it is complex so it cannot match a single musical note well.
Cantonese has 6 tones. The wide enough variety ensures each musical note has some matching tones, and none of the contours is complex as the 3rd tone in Mandarin.
I sing, and I also speak Mandarin Chinese. In my experience tones can still be sung to a degree, but it's still mostly contextual, a bit like the regular spoken language.
In Vietnam people will try their best to fit the lyrics into the song while writing songs so the tones wont change too much when singing
Can people please stop saying that speakers of tonal languages sing when they talk? They clearly don't, and it's not the right way to begin learning about tones. It might be a cute way to look at it, but in the end, it's just not true, and very misleading.
I've learnt to speak a tonal language and I completely agree. I would never describe it as singing.
Agree, I'm Vietnamese and I don't think we're singing at all when we speak.
More importantly, tones may make tonal languages harder to sing comparing to non-tonal languages. As the writer of the lyric must be very careful to couple the tune of music and the tone of words together, otherwise there will be much comfusion, either you have to sing the wrong tone of a word, or you have to sing out of the tune.
Well how else would you describe a tonal language to somebody that doesn't speak a language with tones? The idea of it is such an absurd concept, that I can't even begin to understand it, nor even what one is doing to the vowels to speak said 'tones'.
gredangeo A tonal language uses different pitch patterns to distinguish between words. These pitch patterns are known as tones.
To describe this to an English speaker, you can use simple examples of tone use in English. For example "Really? Yes, really." The word "really" has a different pitch pattern (i.e. tone) in the question and answer.
A tonal language uses these tones, not just to convey meaning and emotion, but also to distinguish between actual words. Two words with the same consonant/vowel sounds but different tones will be interpreted [correctly] as completely different words.
Note that in the above example, you wouldn't tell someone that the word "really" has to be sung differently or that to get the right tone, you need to sing the word "really" correctly. This is the whole point of this comment thread. Tones are pitch patterns, but to describe them as singing is unhelpful.
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
Actually, traditional Thai has 6 tones but modern Thai now has only 5 because there were two sound that so close together and quite hard for non native. Also, the standard 5 tones are native to Bangkok and quite only the capital of Bangkok. You go away to another province then you fine 5 different tones for the same language. Some area even swap two or three tones from the standard Thai tones. Well, it's complicated even for Thai. Lol
I went to a Cantonese-speaking Chinese school in my childhood days and dropped out after three years. It was all immersion and rote memorization. They never discussed the concept of tones and that there are six of them. If a student pronounced a word with the wrong tone, he would just be corrected by telling him to mimic what the teacher is saying.
Another thing they never explained to me in Chinese school is that spoken Cantonese does not always use the same words that are used in the written form of the language.
There are 9 tones actually. :)
John Chan 6, because the last 3 Tones correspond to tones 1,3 and 6. they just have a different ending
@@yeicore
The different endings are so different that they should be classified as tones 7, 8 and 9 respectively. This is the traditional classification.
In Mandarin Chinese schools, tones are taught.
@RaymondHng Apparently, they thought that the concept of tones would be too complicated for children.
The Indo-European language family interestingly does have one tonal language: Punjabi (including closely related languages of Dogri and Lahnda, which are dialects relative to Punjabi). There are several other Indo-European languages with pitch accent (such as Swedish and the Baltic languages) but Punjabi is the only language that has full phonemic tones - three of them to be exact.
That’s kind of crazy that it’s the only one! It’s very unique then!
As a Punjabi speaker I came to comments looking for exactly this comment 😂
Sylheti is also a tonal indo European language
😂 there are many more tonal indo european languages, even vedic sanskrit was a tonal language, haryanvi and rajasthani are also tonal. Western dialects of Hindi like Khariboli and Brijbhasha are also tonal. Also many dialects of Bengali too and there is also Sylheti..
After being alive 28 years, one suddenly comes in contact with the love its life. Filology joins together culture, sounds and language. If I would start my studies again I would enrole in this for sure. Thank you, whoever you are for allowing be to find this
This is a reason singers are often not lyricists in Hong Kong. Filling a song with a set amount of syllables that rhyme and have cohesive meaning is one thing, but adding tones into consideration makes writing Cantonese lyrics challenging.
While Mandarin songs give no fucks about tones.
Samuel Lo haha xD True xD
+Samuel Lo NO,pop songs give no fucks about tones.Every pop songs do not really care the pronunciation,not just the Mandarin songs,Cantonese songs do that too.But the folk songs do care every one pronunciation.A good folk song singer will perfectly pronounce every one word
Ekiak T I was talking about tones, not pronunciation in general. But I can assure you Cantonese songs, well-written songs DO require the tones matching the melody. Or else it sounds like a church hymn.
+Samuel Lo whole my life I've been wondering why Mandarin songs do not have to give a fuck about tones while we do.
In Serbian we have 6 tones. They are just written in books about the Serbian language, but not in usual writing. Most of the people just use them without knowing their existence:
In stressed syllables we have:
1. the long rising tone (á)
Example: the first “a” in tama (darkness)
2. the long falling tone (â)
Example: the “a” in laž (lie)
3. the short rising tone (à)
Example: the first “a” in pratilac (companion)
4. the short falling tone (ȁ)
Example: the first “a” in žaba (frog)
In unstressed syllables we have:
5. the short flat tone (a)
Example: the second “a” in lagati (to lie)
6. the long flat tone (ā)
Example: This tone is mostly used for the Genitive Plural. The last “a” of maraka (marks; this is the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina)
One special thing: The tones also apply for the letter “R” because the letter is treated as a vowel.
i guess we slovenians have it too then...? I actually never realized it. Pozdrav iz Slovenije!
it is more about pitch accent than tones tho
I didn't know Serbian had tones
Swedish: Ord
English: Word
Swedish: /uːɖ/
English: /wɜː(ɹ)d/
It's still a good trick when it's written.
Сергей Свирса
Less of a trick, more of a comparison of cognates :)
McDucky I wish I were native english speaker who doesn't have any vocabulary issues but I'm not one of them.
Сергей Свирса
Keep learning :)
"Intonation" or "emphasis" might be better metaphors for how tonal languages work than "singing". Something that really helped me start to correctly produce and mentally process tones was a video from YoYo Chinese were the teacher compared Mandarin tones to English pragmatic tones. For example tone 1 is like saying "hi!", tone 2 is like a question "what?, tone 3 is like a disappointed "oh", and tone 4 is like an angry or emphatic "no!". It was helpful to learn that English has all four Mandarin tones but that they're not lexemic but suprasegmental/pragmatic.
No they are not ‘better’ metaphors. You said this because you still don’t get it.
NONONONO if anyone is reading this comment please don't follow his advice!!!!
Intonation and emphasis is what you call stress or pitch, it is NOT about tones at all!! You can deemphasize any tone or stress it or anything it is completely unrelated.
This analogy may serve you in Japanese and Norwegian but it's seriously damaging if you take it to tonal languages!
No that’s pitch accent, nothing to do with tones
@@crusaderACR
i won't comment on 'seriously damaging' though i doubt it, but the rest of the comment is overcorrection and frankly a mess
intonation, emphasis, stress, pitch are all different things, but if you want to bunch them all together then you might as well include tone in there, why not
what's important is nobody said anything about stress, OP was talking about intonation. the stress in english uses relative pitch, volume, vowel quality, vowel length and consonant quality, so it's difficult for building analogies
english intonation relies more on relative pitch, so you can try to help english speakers by describing tones like that since
phonemic tone also uses pitch, there's no two ways about it
'For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". ' -Wikipedia
even if they are very different, telling people 'this is seriously damaging' without providing an alternative is unproductive
tell them 'don't think of it like intonation', but then they'll think of it like music, the less accurate analogy, or worst of all, they won't think of it at all
Just to add some points to this informative video:
-How do tonal languages deal with singing? Generally, if there's a clash between the prescribed pitch in music and tone, musicality takes precedence. However, some languages value harmony between the two more than others. For example, in Cantonese, Hokkien, and Vietnamese songs, the pitch contour tends to match natural speech pretty well, while in Mandarin, tone is largely ignored in singing.
-Tonal languages can still have sentential pitch. As linguist Y. R. Chao put it, “...The question has often been raised as to how Chinese can have sentence intonation if words have definite tones. The best answer is to compare syllabic tone and sentence intonation with small ripples riding on larger waves (though occasionally the ripples may be “larger” than the waves.)...”
-It's not only vowels that carry tones. Some consonants can form syllables on their own and thus can carry tones in the absence of a vowel. M and N are common examples.
1. In Vietnamese (I'm Vietnamese), singing doesn't always require same tones. For example a final word on first sentence can be MÁ while the one on second sentence can be MẠ and no one would complain. But, it's generally ideal to register different musical notes to different words based on their tones. Again, it's not 100% necessary.
2. Not in Vietnamese (or least in the Southern dialect).
3. This is true. For example, MÍT contains IT which, by default, is pronounced ÍT. However, I don't know about your case with the consonants M and N. In Vietnamese, it applies to T (as in above example) and P.
Sure there are a lot of badly toning Mandarin songs out there, but it's all the fault of those undereducated lyric writers and composers. The traditional Chinese songs actually requires that the tones of the lyrics words to be matched harmonically with the melody. Failing to meet this requirement is a flaw called 倒字飘音（words tumbled, sound floated away）Some old and extant opera types like 昆曲(Kunqu) still stick to this tradition. Those tonality ignoring songs are indeed hardly intelligible, e. g. a line of a children's song writes: "小松樹，快長大" （O little pine, grow faster), however when I was a child I first heard it, I thought it says "小松鼠，快長大" ( O little squirrel, grow faster). Because it's badly composed, the word 松樹(pine -sōngshù ) sounds exactly like 松鼠(sōngshǔ) in this melody.
And THEN there's stuff like Japanese, which isn't really tonal but has a different way of pronounciation used only for singing--they pronounce _every single letter_! Even normally silent ones or skipped syllables. At least, that's what I've noticed on every anime theme song I've ever heard. :P
How weird would it be in English if, for example, we SAID "tone" as "toan" but _sang_ it as "toan-ee"? It's like that. I have no idea how that came about--sure, sometimes it helps you cheat the meter, but other times it messes it up!
Blinky Lass as someone who has been taught to sing Chinese songs, unless if it’s a Classical Chinese song, 京劇，茉莉花，我在這兒等著你回來，or whatever that’s when you would put more emphasis on tones, however modern music doesn’t doesn’t do. Rap, pop, rock. They just pronounce the words clearly. Hence the reason why there’s always subtitles for every single Chinese song. Because if you were to focus on tones and singing it would sound like a hot ass mess. Trust me I’ve tried
They cope with it. That’s why I dislike Vietnamese songs while being a Viet myself
A little piece of trivia: At the start of the video, the word "word" is constructed by placing a w in front of the letters "ord". But in a way, you could say that it already said "word" on the screen before - just in another language. The Danish word for "word" is "ord".
that's actually pretty interesting!
also Swedish
@@kuutti256 Og norsk
Also Norwegian
Also, W is a semi-vowel, not a consonant.
Having tried out mandarin (when i was hyper about china back in the day) this was one of the first things being taught. A challenge indeed.
Why would you choose to torment yourself like that?!?
@@NativLang im learning manadrin, and its easy for me. Guess im a fast learner
@@NativLang just think of it this way, listen to each word people introduce u in a tonal language and just think of it that it just* sounds that way. especially since there's no obvious organized pattern to which words are gonna have this and that specific tone. this is also how babies or children grow up learning tonal languages. dont needlessly scare yourself at the supposed number of tones whichever tonal language has. it's just a side detail on how this and that word is supposed to properly be said like so other homophones are definitely differentiated.
There are even tonal Germanic languages.
Norwegian/Swedish use contour tones. Luckily, we only have two tone patterns, so it is not too difficult.
For example, the norwegian word for "the tank" is "tanken" with tone 1. And "the thought" is "tanken" with tone 2.
It is a little complicated with Norwegian dialects tho, because we have two dialectal systems devided in to low-high vs high-low tonal dialects. Luckily, tone 1 and 2 for the high-low dialect is just a perfect inversion of the low-high tones. So tone 1 and 2 still follow the same principles, only mirrored.
Some dialects of the Cantonese language in Guangxi or other areas may have 9~10 tones. And there are also many languages with 6~8 tones in the Southwestern part of China, spoken by minority ethnics like Bai, Hani people.
I stopped learning Mandarin because it was impossible for me to mimic the sounds in a sentence. I usually ended up saying something completely different and nonsensical.
You just need to get your mouth positions right, then you will realise tones are actually not that hard
@@sr.liam17 Yeah easy to say for the native speaker but thanks for the motivation
Mandarin tones are easy, speaking them right just requires practice. I've been studying Mandarin for just 2 months, and of course I'm nowhere near fluency, however I can finally read sentences with mostly correct tones, it's all about pronouncing the correct tones when studying new words so you don't memorize them wrong, then it becomes muscle memory.
I learnt it as following the shape of the diacritics.
So, for example, ma:
妈 (mā) would be level/straight tone with no variations.
麻 (má) would a rising tone.
马 (mǎ) would be a falling, then rising tone.
骂 (mà) is a firm, falling tone.
@@theboxygenie I think you swapped the diacritics for the rising and falling tone
Then again I speak Cantonese so maybe it’s different
Rising and falling pitch can also change the meaning of words in the *European* languages of Swedish and Norwegian. So it's not just a question of Asian and Native American tongues.
1:20 I always have trouble in hearing tones, but that example was really perfect. Especially the staying one
Punjabi is the 2nd largest tonal language after Chinese. Here's an example:
1. Kāṛi = chain, loop of a chain
2. Kàṛi = curry (dish)
3. Kǎṛi = watch,clock
So if you say: "Kàṛi te vela ki hoya?" (What's the time on the curry)
which makes no sense
You have to say: "Kǎṛi te vela ki hoya?" (What's the time on the watch)
+Arslan Ahmad Then, does "kari te vela ki hoya?" with no tones makes sense in real life?
伊藤那由多 Kaṛi with neutral tone would mean the same thing as Kāṛi (chain loop). So the sentence would mean: What's the time on the chain. Which also makes no sense.
谢谢
These are not tones. These are examples of stress, which is phonologically a different concept. One of the few European languages that has tones at all is Swedish - I can't think of any other example.
Spanish, Hungarian, (modern) Greek, and Portuguese are NOT tonal!
You can easily tell the difference with your Portuguese example because of the articles placed in front. Meu avô vs. minha avó. Not only is this a difference in stress (not pitch), the vowels themselves are different - ô is like the 'oa' in coal whilst ó is like the 'o' in hot.
I love tonal languages! Makes them so much more unique. Being a dorky choir kid in high school, i now love trying to learn tonal languages. Navajo is fascinating and I love how Chinese languages sound. This video makes me want to learn Cantonese more than mandarin now because of the complexity.
I love the Thai language I’m practicing it now and I’m getting really getting the hang of it.
One could argue that English is just as much a tonal language as Mandarin, but in a different way.
In Mandarin tones convey the semantics associated with a syllable, so that 马 (Mǎ) has a different meaning from 妈 (Mā), the former meaning horse, and the latter meaning mom.
In English however, the tonality is expressed in a different way. A rising tone expresses a question, a falling tone expresses the end of a sentence, while a continued tone expresses continuity within the sentence.
This form of tonality isn't _super_ important in English, as one can do without; but they do form contextual clues, and someone speaking without using these correctly could come across as foreign.
True, intonation matters for context and speaking "like a native". Mandarin teachers even use examples of English intonation in context to give students a feel for the four (well, "five") tones.
***** I remember when taking classes in Mandarin, that the downward tone (I forget their numbers) was like giving orders in English; very short and ending lower than where you started, and the rising tone was like asking a question in English.
These things seem super foreign to apply on a per syllable basis to us westerners, but it makes perfect sense in terms of Chinese syntax and semantics.
Yes. " *I* don't think you stole it," means that although *I* don't think you're guilty, somebody else does think that.
"I don't think *you* stole it," means that I do think it was stolen, but by somebody other than you.
The tones turn exactly the same words in exactly the same order into two sentences that mean entirely different things altogether.
The Goodly Dragon
but that's emphasis more than tone, isn't it?
What you've described for English is actually called Pitch Accent:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent_(intonation)
And yes, Pitch Accent is different from tones.
Hokkien (a.k.a. Taiwanese) -which has 7-8 tones depending upon the dialect- was a challenge to learn because one you learn to identify and produce the tones, you get hit with the news of tonal sandhi. Tonal sandhi is when the tone of the first word in a compound word changes. This sounds daunting, but it works much like episiotomy in European languages as it aids the flow.
as a Taiwanese, I can't speak Taiwanese 😢
(most people lives in Northern Taiwan without grandparents only can speak Mandarin)
The very difficult part in Mandarin is that the tones of a word can change if they come after certain other tones or if they are part of a phrase. Also, there are five tones, including a soft tone. "Ma" can be in all five tones, meaning mom, numb, horse, scold; and it can be put at the end of a question.
Wow, that word's similar to Vietnamese
The Cantonese news anchor on tv sounds like he’s always singing when he's reporting. Sometimes, I suddenly laugh when he’s talking because it really sounds like a song.
0:25 I noticed the graphics designer used Kanji/Hanja stroke order when making the checkboxes. Was that intentional?
I know a lot of people think this but mandarin doesn't have four tones it actually has five ^^ the last tone is a short sort of neutral tone where you basically shorten the sound of the word you're saying.
In Vietnamese there are six but actually more than it because each regions has a unique way to make their tones
*Advantages:*
-Shorter and simpler words
-The ability to discard inflections
-Harmonious speeches
*Disadvantages:*
-It may sound awkward during conversation.
-Singing may be more arduous since word tones can conflict with music tones.
-Some words become obscene and offensive if their tone is not pronounced right.
-Writing down the language would be a pain. Vietnamese for example, tend to have TOO many diacritics and it takes forever to write, both in handwriting and in typing.
Sound awkward during conversation? wym by that?
@@rmadridista369 in some cases, not always
for the “sounding awkward” it’s important to note that tonal languages are relative, so the high tone is higher than the low tone. this means that you can still have inflections over entire sentences as long as the tones next to each other contrast correctly
Technically there are 9 tones in Cantonese but the extra 3 are derivations of the other ones and are only slightly different.
Americans are confused because we always raise our voice when we ask a question.
Another thing English speakers do without realizing is that when talking about a list of things, we put a rising tone on each item in the list, except for the last one, which gets a falling (or rising-falling) tone. You might be able to notice it if you count from one to ten, especially if you've had any Chinese lessons.
Whaaaat?
@@andrewdunbar828 reminds me of how the tone sandhi works in southern chinese languages like hokkien
I can speak French Vietnamese and English fluently , which makes any of the other languages easy to learn for me ! (I’ve learnt Japanese, Italian, Cantonese)
No wonder people tell us Swedes it sounds like we are singing, we are practically singing our language 💖
Norwegians sing as well. But apparently that’s the wrong phenomenon. I think I would use something more like an elevator or something
I think pitch accent like in Swedish sounds more like signing than most tonal languages because there’s more continuation of the pitch across a whole word/phrase. But that’s just my impression. I generally prefer the sound of pitch accent to tones though bc pitch accents are very pleasant to hear
If someone wonders why English is not considered a tonal language even though it has stress, tone and stress aren’t the same things. Stress is where you make a part of a word or sentence louder or more prominent, while pitch or tone is where you make a part of a word change in pitch, not in volume. For example Swedish has both stress and pitch. Depending on which part of a sentence you stress the sentence can mean different things. “VAD gjorde du igår?”, “WHAT did you do yesterday?”, emphasising what specific action someone did, is different from “Vad gjorde DU igår?”, What did YOU do yesterday?”, emphasising what a specific person did. When it comes to pitch the word can get another meaning depending on if you go from a lower tone to a higher tone, vice versa, or staying on the same tone. A word can have both pitch and stress! For example, if we let capitalised words represent emphasis, / represents going from lower to higher pitch and \ represents going from higher to lower pitch, “Den HELIGA and/en”, “The HOLY spirit”, emphasises that the spirit is holy, and since you go from lower to higher note in “anden” it means spirit, but if you instead say for example “Den heliga AND\EN”, “The holy DUCK”, you emphasise that it’s a duck, you don’t emphasise that the duck is holy, and because you go from a higher pitch to a lower pitch in “anden” it means duck, not spirit.
What do they do when they have to whisper?
It's all about context!
Not sure, but you can whisper tones.
L4sz10 u can still have tones when u whisper (in Mandarin). idk it just comes naturally
tones are about pitch not volume
Bori Wongkha
And whispering is about voicing, not just volume :)
Mandarin third tone does not "go up" at the end, except in certain circumstances, like when emphasizing a word. The most regular way of pronouncing the third tone is as a low flat tone, contrasting with the high flat tone (first tone). Linguists call this the "half third tone," and I indicated above, it is very rare to use the "full third tone" with the fall-rise contour.
I took Mandarin in College... half the 1st class was all about learning the tones. And I learned from a native speaker who only came to america a few years prior. Tones are certainly something that is always hard to pick up, and not using the right one can be MAJOR trouble.
My favorite example of this is "Ma": I forget which tone means which off the top of my head, but one tone of "Ma" means Horse, one means Mother, one means Marijuana, and the flat tone is a particle for a question mark. You can only imagine what problems this can cause if you mess up the tones on this, I'm sure.
This was entertaining and very informative! one of your better videos, good job!
What happens if you are singing and you want to sing the higher 'ha' lower then it is?
Black hole?
I've heard that when singing in Mandarin, you simply disregard the tones, and pay attention to context. I can guess it would be pretty hard to understand though.
I don't know about Chinese, but in Thai, to sing some words to reach a certain note and our voice is not that high to reach it, we can change the tone of the word and it helps us to reach the note. For listening, we know what words sung from context as in other tone the word would not make any sense at all. Plus, I do not quite sure but I think it's subtle for us to notice how the tone of the music goes and how that affects the tone of the word as we listen since being a child
As what Andrew said, we actually disregard the tones when we sing. We can usually understand what is being sung, but sometimes we meme out of the ambiguity lol
For contour tones, from what I know in Mandarin, you can disregard them. But when it comes to both types combined, as a Cantonese speaker, you have to match the tones to the notes. From my own observation, it's usually the pitch of a note relative to the closest few notes that has to match the tone.
Gotta say that you are an incredible teacher! It's always fun watching your videos, and I always learn so much. Thank you!
In Sabah (north borneo), our language makes us show emphasis by lengthening the words and in a higher pitch. And we apply this even in English! For example, if we want to say "my hometown is really far away", we'd say "my hometown is faaaaar away". Not all English words roll off the tongue with it though.
In portuguese we would repeat/length the word "very", but It depends on the distance.
"My house is very far from here." =Your house is in the other side of the city
"My house is veeery Far away from here" = your house is in the closest city
"My house is very very far away from here" = your house is in the furthest city
"My house is veeery veeeeeeery Far away from here" = your house is in the other side of the state
"My house is Very Very veeery far away from here" = your house is in the closest town from the neighbor state
"My house is veeery veeeeeeery veeeeeeeeeeeery Far away from here" = your house is in another state
"My house is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery Very Far away from here" = your house is in the other side of the country
"My house is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery veeeeeeeeeery veeery Far away from here" = you live in a neighbor country.
And so on.
many of my students speak Zomi, which is a Burmese dialect. When they repeat what I say, they say it in exactly the same tone. At first I thought they were being rude, but that's how their language is spoken. You're right...learning a tonal language is extremely difficult.
Hi I'm a native Cantonese speaker 😂😂 I think my language works perfectly well
Who would like to hear a linguistic nightmare?
A Contour tone, abjad, language which hasn't had a spelling reform in ages, along with 5 scripts, 4 of which you have to use in different contexts and learn 50 letters of, along with a fifth script with over 45,000 symbols, all referencing their pertaining material in cryptic ways.
Some European languages are semi-tonal. I speak Serbo-Croatian, which has four "pitches" for accent: low rising, low falling, short rising, and short falling.
This means that the word "mali" changes meaning based on what pitch you give it. It can either mean "small," or the country Mali.
雨琛涂 The west South Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian) are the only Slavic languages which have pitch accent. Again, it's not as prominent as actual tone in Chinese -- it's pitch accent, not tone. However, it does help differentiate words, and when words are pronounced with the wrong "type" of accent, it is noticeably different.
For more info:
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent)
O ovome treba diskutovati i na nasim prostorima! :)
In Serbo-Croatian some words can change meaning based on tones. On example:
Grad- city/hail
Duga- rainbow/long one(f);
Luk- onion, bow;
Lak- easy, light-weighted (m)/ varnish
Also sometimes grammatical cases differ only by tone.
I wouldn't say that these words have different meanings because of tone. Tone doesn't exist in Serbo-Croatian, there is only pitch. But even then, it is not because of it. The only thing that differentiates these words is vowel length. Sure, linguists say that it is actually the accent, but it is just the vowel length. And words lak and lak are homonyms. There isn't any difference in their pronunciation. In the Bosnian standard, it is even incorrect to say lak as an adjective, the correct term is lahak.
How do you mean "it is only a pitch", pitch IS the same thing as a (grammatical) tone. Of course, it is simple tonal system compared to Mandarin, but still those are pitches/ grammatical tones. They are not just short/long, but also low or high. That combination gives 4 tones, not just 2 based on vowel length.
Vowel length is another thing, it mostly appears in grammatical cases (so called genitive length), and it coexist with a tone. So the tone is on the one vowel, and the genitive length is on the other vowel.
On example: with mother- sa mȃjkōm. The tone is on a (long and low tone) but the genitive length is on o.
About the "correct term" lahak- I have never heard that word in my life. I can not even imagine how would that even change in different grammatical cases. Maybe you mean "lagan"? And here is another example :) because this word also has different meaning based on tone.
Let's not forget that it's not just in tone languages that people "sing" when they speak. There are also pitch accent languages, and to build any phrase or any word out of more than one syllable, they need a combination of tones, or tones on stressed syllables to make meaning.
These languages don't pay attention to individual tones like Chinese languages or Thai but to differences in the pitch of the syllables of a word or phrase, or the pitch of stressed syllables relative to unstressed syllables.
If the pitch accent is mobile, then it is possible for a combination of syllables to have different meanings according to the way it is intonated. Or a combination of syllables with one stress point may have different meanings according to whether the stressed syllable is uttered at a higher or lower tone than an unstressed syllable.
I went to a farm.
They produce produce.
They wouldn't take our trash.
They refuse refuse.
I went to the studio to record a record.
Amanda Esse Oh I know. Just showing English has its own way of distinguishing homophobes or homonyms. ;)
Adam Vanderpluym but isn't intonation is different from tones?
These differences are not just of stress, they also involve vowel quality, viz. a reduced 'o' in 'produce' (the verb), and an 'i' sound replacing the written 'e' in both 'refuse' and 'record' (the verbs).
Adam Vanderpluym : Shouldn't that be "*ex*tinguishing homophobes?
None of those words are homophones in the spoken language. It's just that English spelling is bullshit.
I just wanna add that the term 'register' is sometimes also used to refer to a suprasegmental feature that combines tone and vowel phonation. Here it is not clear if it is the tone or the phonation type that is the defining feature and these two features do not occur independently. In Veitnamese, for example, the rising tone occurs with creaky voice or a glottal stop in the middle of the vowel and the low tone with breathy voice. This is invariable hence it makes sense to just consider them a bundle of features that forms a complex feature called register. There are also languages where that have both vowel phonation type and tone and use them independently of each other giving as a hypothetical example a syllable with high tone and modal voice vs a high tone syllable in creaky voice and so on.
Cantonese:
Maai (mid-low rising) = Buy
Maai (mid-low level) = Sell
In stock market transactions, we prefer saying 'call' and 'put' rather than the Cantonese words.
In Sino-Vietnamese,we also have this:
Mại(dot tone):to sell
Mãi(broken tone):to buy
And in normal Vietnamese we have these:
Mái-roof/oar(rise tone)
Mãi Mãi-forever
Mài-to grind(down tone)
Mải-to concentrate on something that forget everything else(question tone)
Mai-tomorrow/apricot blossoms(flat tones)
Awesome video! Since you made a video about languages that rely on tone, it would be really cool if you did one on languages that have no tone at all; signed languages. Signed languages are as varied and interesting as spoken language, but many people remain unaware that they even exist. American Sign Language even has several writing systems that in no way resemble written English.
Just a thought! Hope you consider it :) Love your work!
I'm Thai and in Thai, there is a different length in tone for example กา is with a long aah so gaah while กะ is shorter so gah
Cantonese has this too, but Mandarin doesn't. In Cantonese they traditionally count the short ones and long ones as separate tones, which adds up to nine tones. The Thai tradition is to count the short and long ones as the same tone. If you counted Cantonese tones the Thai way there would be six. If you counted Thai tones the Cantonese way there would be nine (-:
Changes in tone may not change the meanings of English words, but they can change the meaning of statements.
Is this channel associated with LangFocus? I'm new to this channel, but I already love it!
Welcome! Glad you came to visit! No, just on here doing my own thing. I started with linguistics lessons years ago and gradually shifted to fun animations.
These two are my favorites too (not sure though if two and too could give me a tonal- tongue cramps ehehe)
Would be nice to have some examples up in this video as well.
Q: ไม้ใหม่ไหม้ไหม?
A: ไม่, ไม้ใหม่ไม่ไหม้. ไม้ไม่ใหม่ไหม้.
Never had it explained so simply. Fantastic!
Helps to hear Mandarin and try to copy what you hear. It's very easy once you get the hang of it, and it's no difficult to remember which word has what tone, until you reach things like 老师， 老是， 老实 which are all pronounced "lao shi" with different tones (one being "teacher", next being "always", and last one being "honest") meaning that you can write 老师老是老实, meaning "The teacher is always honest", however it isn't much difficult form remembering which "there" or "their" to use, as well as "to" "too" and "two"; actually it is much easier, because with the writing system comes the meaning so it is very easy to not get mixed up between them all.
Their characters function as like pictures or even logos(and we remember company logos pretty easily) then. Helps distinguish between similar sounds or homophones. And people said a picture says a thousand words....like this ancient Chinese character 囧 which means a type of Chinese window, but is now used as an emoji to express embarrassment or sadness.
I think what really makes it hard for westerns et al to learn tonal languages is that they've been told thousands of times that it's like singing, that it sounds musical, or that tones are like notes or pitches. Even in videos like this that tries to clarify the difference between register tones and contour tones on the one hand but still floods us with the old analogies on the other hand. I recommend watching the videos by Stu Jay Raj who explains tone as throat control. He speaks great Thai and Mandarin and pretty good Vietnamese and Cantonese. Here's a linguistics paper by a Vietnamese Canadian titles "Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch" for those inclined to read technical stuff. I've tried to teach myself a bit of Mandarin, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese in my travels and the only tone that strikes me as "musical" or "sing song" is the high level "tone 1" in Mandarin. It's probably better to compare tones to vowels than to consonants, since consonants have definite locations inside the mouth whereas both vowels and tones are relative.
Burmese, thai, vietnamese, etc
one of the few times outside of music where having perfect pitch helps a lot
Well ppl say my mother tongue Minnan(in Taiwan) has eight tones and a very complex tone sandhi system, but i just speak this language naturally with my family all my life even without knowing them tho
It's my mother tongue too!
Tones actually change the meaning of something. Drastically
I seriously appreciate the work you do to make these videos for us. There so awesome to listen to and watch! Keep up the great work!
An aside - I'm making a constructed language with five tones and a few tone "shapes", so this video was a plus!
The singing analogy for tones in language, it reminds me of this one video wherein a guy does a guitar cover of the "Steamed Hams" clip from The Simpsons, matching the rising and falling tones in the speech with the notes on his guitar.
Just like "tomten" and "tomten".
Two different words in Swedish depending on where you set the tone at the end.
I cant even explain how i say them differtently, but I feel like the tone is mostly on the first O on jultomten, and a longer m in hustomten.
tÅmtenn
ToohMMten
Thai is my language and it's stupidly hard.
คาว kaao = fishy
ข่าว kaao = news
ข้าว kaao = rice
ขาว kaao = white
เข่า kao = knees
เข้า kao = to enter
เค้า kao = he/she, him/her (spoken language)
เขา kao = he/she, him/her (written language)
I have a feeling that the tonal system is a nuisance when you actually sing. I find it very hard to pick up words from Mandarin lyrics when they're sung because the tunes in which the words are sung mess up the original tone of the words and make them unintelligible
OMG; THANKS A LOT for the explanation of how the mid-rise etc. contours are pronounced!!!
Punjabi is the only tonal language in Indo-Europeon language cateogory.
No, ne realliche. Swedish ænd Limburgish ar also wœn of a few.
@@HinaKhan-ou3xc I'd personally call those languages semi-tonal, as they do have tones associated with "correct" pronunciation of vowels, but not the variety of tones on the same vowel as a language like Mandarin does.
Oh, and I'm loving the Anglo-Saxon spelling by the way...
@@rjfaber1991 Just because a language doesn't have as many tone variants as Mandarin for example it doesn't mean that it's not tonal.
Swedish has about 2 different pronunciations for each vowel, so it's not as variable of course, but each brings a different meaning to the word. It's definitely a tonal language that is very rich in diphthongs - even single syllable words have double tones. In the end it's the rhythm and stressing of the word that is important, not necessarily the pronunciation of vowels - otherwise a Stockholmer would not be able to understand a Scanian. :)
Standard Serbian is a tonal language too. And it is Indo-European
@@thesljivo4101 Punjabi is the only Fully tonal one, Norwegian, Swedish and some Baltic languages are partially tonal.
When I started learning Chinese I used music to get the tones right. I would literally play the tones with my guitar and sing them. Now people think I'm a native speaker whenever they listen to me on the phone or if they don't see my so obviously not Chinese face 😂
that's... not how it works at all. please stop comparing tonal languages to singing. it's just... it does not work like that. If it is then all english speakers are singing when they ask questions because they raise the tone of the last vowel
Mandarin sentences start with tones but in the end may "get lazy" and drop them because at that point, with the main ideas at the start of the sentence, an "obvious" or "you know what I mean" phase occurs so you are less likely to misinterpret a syllable.
I know, and Mandarin gets a bit "stressed language" ish too due to emphasis on certain words. You only get the very clear tones when you listen to a newscast. I've heard region northern dialects of it that really sound like they don't bother much with the tones, other than the words they're emphasizing, all the grammatical particles become the obscure non-tone "5th tone" they teach you in school
I'm learning Cantonese and OH....MY.......GOSH!!!!!! O.o at first I thought the tones would be hard but now I'm getting the hang of it that I have some favorite tones lol XD
I think the most embarrassing thing I did was mess up the work hai6. Which means "yes". I said it too high which means "vagina" :O
Catch: Mandarin has a secret fifth tone. It's true, people. The fifth tone is airy, like when you speak 妈妈 (Mā ma, or mother) Notice how the second 'ma' does not have a tone on top. This kind of airy tone is found where the same character repeats twice to make a phrase. (sometimes)
Lets not forget the Scandinavian languages and their singing.
They are not tonal, they are pitch-accents
Have some fun with Norwegian, buddy
En dør - A door
Han dør - He's dying
"Dør" is pronounced the exact same way
Du - You
Do - Toilet
Sokker - Socks
Sukker - Sugar
Ved - Firewood
Ved - Close to
Like ved - Nearby
Fire - Four
Fyre - to light fire
@@404Icy Dont get me started on Lithuanian
Lord Metroid I'm learning norwegian
the13ator But yes, they are actually tonal. You’re statement is false.
There was a language (I can't remember which) and it actually developed tones from glottal stops. Apparently they only had glottal stops in between vowels, and that caused an extra syllable. The speakers of the language didn't like this extra syllable and then merged the two vowel sounds together. As a result, some words sounded the same when spoken, so to differentiate the words, the words that previously had a glottal stop now had a rising tone.
A Turn In The Game Of... Modern Chinese developed tones from word-end /s/ and /?/ (glottal stop) in Ancient Chinese
If I remember correctly, similar happened in Punjabi, which is one of the few truely tonal indo-european languages.
@nativlang Why does noone think of say Norwegian when talking about tonal languages?
Viktor Tomanov Maybe the tones are not as critical for us to understand what a learner of Norwegian says than say, in Mandarin. I can usually understand if a foreigner says “Eg treng passe» when what he’s trying to say is “Eg treng passet”, both of which have the same pronunciation but different tonal movements.
Norwegian still has this in various dialects. In mainstream Norwegian tones are used to distinguish between plural farmers, beans, and prayers.
Tone seems to me like it makes a language unnecessarily complicated. I know people have embarrassing stories of them trying to learn a tonal language, and with the slightest mispronunciation or wrong tone, it turns out they accidentally said a curse word. Why would a language evolve that way, that the difference between a normal word and a curse word is their tone? It seems unnecessarily complicated to me, and hard for non-tonal language speakers to grasp.
That sort of embarrassment doesn't only happen in tonal languages. Many non-native English speakers have trouble with the vowels in "beach" and "folk," both of which are near-homonyms to curse words in English.
I am well to see the video offering Cantonese subtitle, what's an impressive surprise!
You guys should look into Serbo-Croatian. One of the only truely Tonal languages in Europe.
Yes and it can be rather dangerous at times. For example Qǐng wěn versus qǐngwèn. The first is a common mistake that some students make which is basically please kiss and the second one is the intended polite request to ask. Probably not something you want to say to somebody's girlfriend or a big burly fighter.
But, if you accidentally swap a 3rd tone for a 4th tone, you'll probably notice the teacher blushing.
We can do that a bit in English by using tones to create innuendos, but that's a completely different thing from being a tonal language.
There more tonal languages in Europe: Swedish, Lithuanian, Latvian and may be some more. It doesn't play a big part in Latvian for instance but I've been told that in Lithuanian there a enough frequent words which can be understood wrongly if said with a wrong tone to make conversation hard when you're not fluent enough.
Swedish has a lilt, but not actual tones, i.e you cannot actually alter the meaning of what you say by manipulating pitch. This may have occurred historically by contact with speakers of some Saami languages which were fully tonal.
OlDoinyo - Not quite right. You can form many, many Swedish sentences where the meaning is completely changed if you say the exact same sentence with a different sequence of tones/pitches. The same goes for Norwegian. And Sami languages are not tonal btw.
2:07 it depends on the language. In Mandarin, this is true. In Japanese and Cherokee, tone does not carry that much weight.
I'm happy because I already speak a tonal language :}
Lucky... ;D
***** Ahahahah 😂
It can be hard to get rid of tones when speaking a non-tonal language though :P
***** I was born in Italy, so Italian is also my native language :)
I just realized that the words bønner and bønder in norwegian are only distinguished by tone when spoken. The first is high-low-high and the second is low-high
There is a mistake in your narrative:
'So speaking a word in the wrong tone in one of these languages can sound as bad as putting a "k" where it doesn't belong'. The linguistic community generally agrees that consonants carry more semantic significance than do vowels and tones. In light of this, it would have been more accurate to say "...can sound as bad as putting an 'a' where it doesn't belong'; for example, confusing 'cat' with 'cot'. We can observe this reality when considering Chinese cross-topolectal relationships; the tonal realisations (though not the categories) are all over the map and the vowels are often different yet related, whilst the consonants seldom change radically (at most, a consonant may change to a related one).
Actually, many Mandarin speakers across China (especially if their native language is a local city dialect) will add or drop consonants in their words (i.e., Taiwanese speakers pronounce "shi" and "si" identically), so native Chinese listeners will rely more on the tones than any of the phonemes to pick up on what is being said.
***** The syllables 'zhi/chi/shi' and 'zi/ci/si' have the very (related) consonants to which I had referred in my previous post. In fact, they were considered to be the same initial-group in different 'grades' in the ancient Chinese rime tables. We expect certain consonantal changes like SH>S or B/P>F in all branches of Chinese, as these changes are within certain consonant families. You will rarely (if ever) encounter an extra-familial change like G>ZH, for example (I cannot even think of one instance).
This isn't always true
In some Karen Dialects the words "Thank you" (Ta-bl) and "crazy" (Ta-pl) don't have much of a difference in pronunciation (with both of them taking the form of "ta-bl") and the only difference being their tone, with some dialects putting thank you as the higher tone, and others as the lower tone.
The thing is though: This was just an example meant to demonstrate that the different tones have a huge meaning. You're nitpicking in the wrong place.
iikibiz It's important to have more accurate analogies, though, because confusing the tone in Chinese is not as bad as confusing the consonant. It's a lot more like confusing the vowel, which indeed, like a change in tone, can completely change the meaning of a word. However, a mistaken consonant (from a different consonant group) is so drastic that most speakers can't even rely on context to help.
I bet that really fucks with the way people sing those languages.
Wait so are tonal languages the equivalent of “aRe ToNaL lAnGuAgEs ThE eQuiValEnT oF” this?
No?
Well, you could argue that in "tonal languages" you just have more vocals, which are sub-categories of our "broader-defined" vocals