English as a Tonal Language

Linguistic discussion of Postlexical Processes in American English pronunciation.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• learn English
• English tones
• tonal language
• tones in English
• English pronunciation
• American pronunciation
• no duh

[americaninkorea]

Hi there Mike,

I'm swear I remember seeing a version of this video in Chinese, about English being a tonal language. I'm now teaching in China and really want to show it to my university kids. Do you have the link on hand? I can't find it on your channel. THANK YOU!

[Glossika]

@americaninkorea I've published new findings and will be filming videos for those soon in Chinese.

[samgower]

Wow ok, I sound nothing like you when I speak e.g. The "a" sound in my "can't" sounds like "arm" and I have a definite "t" sound at the end of "can't" - exactly the way you said we don't pronounce it! See I would consider your English accent to be stronger than a lot of people... Maybe if you taught your pupils a version of British English it would be harder for them? I say that only because the way you speak is closer to the sound of Korean than mine! lol

[Glossika]

@samgower That's okay, I wasn't talking about your way of speaking. I was talking about our 310 million people, not you guys. I can't (I mean, cunt) believe you just used the word "pupil" is that still in modern English? Okay, I'm just playing with you... it's a joke, don't get upset! Us Americans occasionally like to tell a few jokes, at the expense of, uh, our fellow Britishers over the, uh, pond. huh-huh (Bush-style)

[miguelcardenasa]

Very interesting video, everything makes sense.

Now, I got a question; I dont understand the alophone of the sound "th" since you are saying that the words with "th" sound must be pronounced like a dentalized "t". OK it is fine when you pronounce that way when it assimilates another sound but not always because this 'th' must be fricative or you can't contrast words like "taught" and " thought" mmm coud you explain to me that?

[Glossika]

@miguelcardenasa Of course we can tell them apart: taught has an aspirated t IPA: [tʰɑʔ], but thought is not aspirated (th is only aspirated when 'thr'), in IPA: [t̪ɑʔ]. Your English 't' should never be dentalized. English 't' has 6 pronunciations: [tʰ] at word onset/strong syllable, [t] in weak syllables (meeting), [ɾ] between vowels (get out), [ʔ] after /n/ and syllable/word coda (important), [d] in weak syllables after voicing (going to), [n] in weak syllables after /n/ (rental, plenty).

[Glossika]

@polychronio If English is the most monotone language in the world, then nothing in this video makes sense, and you probably speak English like a robot, right?

[Glossika]

@polychronio Of course, that's why gringos sound so stupid when they speak Spanish. They put way too much tone onto all the words. If you've gone through any of the government-based Spanish courses, they teach all of this in the phonics section. It's not a question of what languages belong to what "polytone" group, whatever that means, it has to do with the intonation and prosody of the individual language itself.

[R3D54ND]

This seems more to be about intonation than tone....

[Taricus]

For instance "I1 can go!" emphasizes that YOU can go.... "I can1 go!" emphasizes the fact that you realize you can go. "I can go2?" makes it sound like you are surprised that you can do it too... *shrugs*

[Taricus]

You're picking apart intonations. In fact, a lot of the things you are saying are possible, but strangely, it changes the meaning. Instead of causing meaning between words, we have no particles and use tones to imply mood--which could possibly explain why we have been able to mostly drop the subjunctive mood from our conversation... Never considered it before, but it's possible that our use of tones has taken the place of subjunctive moods. Instead of vanishing, it may have taken a new form.

[gariadara]

I've noticed that almost all Germanic languages are very "tonal." And of course Norwegian and Swedish are actually quasi-tonal (pitch accent).

[christopheclugston]

@jradetzky Actually that is a glottal stop that is used in the London accent

[christopheclugston]

@theJrLinguist In Optimality the tone exists above the lexical--look at Tone Sandhi, What you two are talking about is a function of stress patterns in English and Force Projection as it is called in Role and Reference Grammar

[christopheclugston]

@polychronio Noticing some basic errors in this discussion. 1) English is a stress timed languages 2) Spanish, French, Italian are syllable timed languages. Tone is NOT distinctive in English--intonation at the phrase can change the Illocutionary Force in English, however. They also inhabit different frequency ranges. Lots of confusion in this discussion is based on not knowing these aspects inside and out.

[mongolxel]

@Glossika

I think the very only monotonic english accent is "Cybermanish" from Doctor Who