Over at the Log, Victor Mair posted a video by Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot, about how tones work in Chinese, Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese; it’s almost half an hour long, which would normally put me off, but he’s so enthusiastic and informative that I kept watching till the end. His overall point is “Don’t be afraid of tones!”; Mair says:
Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about. […] It’s long and technical, but if you’re truly interested in tones and tonal languages, I would urge you to have a good look and listen to what Stuart Jay Raj has to say about them. He knows his stuff, so even if you’re not specifically interested in mastering tones and tonal language, but are simply interested in the phonological and phonetic principles behind them, you might well learn something useful from this presentation. For example, he has ideas about how creaky voice interacts with the production of tones.
Mair is impressed by “the accuracy of his tones” and “the precision of his pronunciation”; not knowing the languages, I have to take his word for it, but it sounds convincing. His presentation is sometimes odd, and Mair suggests he’s “pretty much of an autodidact,” so you’ll want to read the comments for corrections, but I think it’s worthwhile viewing. Some bits I jotted down: Burmese today is in the tonal evolutionary stage that Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese were in thousands of years ago (18:09); Burmese writing is “round and bubbly” vs. Khmer because the latter was etched in stone, while Burmese was written on palm leaves; “It’s all about the mechanics of the voice”; “If you want to have your mind blown, go and learn Burmese”; “All of these languages are running on the same tonal engine.” If any of that sounds intriguing, check it out.
Creaky voice and tone are quite separate phenomena in Kusaal, and apparently also in Dinka.
It may well be different in Asia: tonogenesis seems to have followed similar paths in a lot of those languages historically (whereas in Africa tone seems often to have been baked in to the protolanguages from way back.)
A straight stroke on a palm leaf is likely to end up as a slit. That’s why the scripts of southern India are all “round and bubbly”, too.
Etched, though? With an acid? I have to doubt that.
Only the guttural letters were etched
round and bubbly
On topic, but by the thinnest of threads:
This expression made me suddenly and strangely think of The Group [1963], which I read in the 60s and have forgotten almost entirely. There was a character in it who was “plump and bubbly”, or something like that. The first name that occurred to me was Polly, but it turns out it was Pokey. As a critic writes: “She is plump and stupid, and cushioned by wealth.”
She is the one who says “Who’d a thunk it?” I now discover that that was an expression used by Mortimer Snerd in the 30-40s.
Time marches on. Plus ça marche, plus c’est la même chose
I won’t repeat the comments I made over there, but aside from Raj’s enthusiasm, the video taught me nothing about how anything works. Possibly if I already had command of one of those languages it could have been otherwise.
(I agree there’s a lot of mystification in standard teaching materials for tonal languages; exacerbated by the darn natives on the street relaxing to neutral tone most of the time. And in Taiwan by people using ‘Taiwanese’ (Southern Min) tones even when ostensibly speaking Mandarin. The ‘frozen garlic’ pun works only in that context.)
“Who’d a thunk it?”
Very familiar phrase to me. Used by my parents all the time (born 1920’s).
Etched, though? With an acid?
I imagine they mean engraved or chiseled — as the Romans did with inscriptions in stone. Although the Romans did manage to engrave curves in some of their letters. I wouldn’t call their work ‘bubbly’, though.
ETA: And I agree with AntC on Who’d a thunk it?. My parents were of the same vintage.
In Kusaal, low tones very often become high via tone sandhi, and both high and low tones become falling before a pause; mid tones, on the other hand, only get altered by tone overlay, not by ordinary sandhi, and don’t change at all before pause. So the most fundamental contrast, rather counterintuitively, is between mid tone and The Rest: stable versus unstable. Once you get hold of that, it all becomes (comparatively) easy …
(It helps that there is enough tone sandhi/overlay going on anyway in Kusaal that people will still recognise the word you meant even if you pronounce it with the wrong tones; mistakes create a rather similar effect to incorrect phrase- or sentence-level stress in English, rather than incorrect word stress or mangling the vowels. It also helps that the numerically few, but very frequent words that always remain low tone in Kusaal are all monosyllabic bound words, and an English speaker will tend to hear them as unstressed clitics and produce them with the correct low tones, albeit for the wrong reasons.)
“Thunk it” as of a previous generation? ngram says usage of the phrase “thunk it” exploded after the early 1980s and continues to this day (having peaked around 2013).
The youtube was a revelation to me, having failed at some attempts to learn tones by pitch.
Yes, I say “Who’d a thunk it?” quite often, and although I am quite old, I was not born in the 1920’s. (My father was. Just. My mother is quite a bit younger.)
having failed at some attempts to learn tones by pitch
Yeah: it’s all about contrasts, not (absolute) pitch. (Otherwise men and women would not be able to communicate …)
Unlike my wife and children, I do not have absolute pitch, or anything even approaching it, but I have always had very good pitch discrimination, probably better than they do. I’m sure it helped when I was learning Kusaal. But obviously any human being with normal hearing can learn tone languages. For an adult L2 learner, it’s really about knowing what to listen for. You can already make all the necessary pitch distinctions in speech. It’s just a question of redeployment of existing resources.
I was attempting to learn by pitch contour, and Stuart Jay Raj confirms that this is wrong by talking about two different pitch contours for the same tone in the same dialect, and making the connection between tones and voicing, aspiration, glottals, etc., which somehow I missed completely before.
My takeaway from his Youtube is that the pitch contour is a secondary effect of the above primary factors, but my Chinese teachers only talked about “falling-rising” etc and asked me to imitate. So I was imitating the wrong things ;(.
Ah. Apologies. I should have realised that you were very unlikely to be making elementary errors about tone.
A lot of that is very language-specific, of course. Kusaal is a lot simpler as far as the realisation of the tonemes themselves goes (though, as commonly in Niger-Congo, it has more complex tone sandhi than SInitic languages do.)
Okeh Who’d a Thunk It? Jack Gardner’s Orchestra 1924.
I’m deeply skeptical of that ngram. _If_ there was an uptick 1980’s it passed me by. And anyway I’d have eschewed it as impossibly cutesy and dated. I see that’s a *books* ngram. I wouldn’t expect “thunk” to appear much in books at that vintage. Can ngram survey a different corpus?
Most of my parents’ catch phrases came from The Goon Show — but I think Milligna would have eschewed for the same reason.
If you want to have your mind blown, go and learn Burmese
Previously on LH (for other reasons).
Google Books is buggy. Searching for “thunk” gives a bunch of results. Searching for “thunk” with any date range at all gives zero results.
Older styles of Burmese script are squarish and more reminiscent of scripts such as Thai. The most common text typefaces used for Khmer today may be squarish, but if you’ve ever been in Cambodia you will have noticed that there is a rounder style of writing that is also popular. All these scripts come in several different writing styles, just as the Latin alphabet can appear very round in a mediaeval Irish manuscript but squarish in Gutenberg’s Bible.
The question of which style came to predominate in modern typography is an interesting one in itself, but I wish people realized that such scripts are not limited to the one or two styles we commonly see.
Your computer might have only one Khmer font, in which case it is almost certainly going to be in the squarish Âksâr chhôr (អក្សរឈរ) style. But the Khmer script is certainly not limited to this. The rounder Âksâr mul (អក្សរមូល) style, which indeed probably owes its appearance to palm-leaf manuscripts, is just as omnipresent. Cambodian bank notes feature both styles alongside each other, for example.
AFAICT Khmer script looks more angular overall because of the peculiarly shaped serifs introducing a lot of small angles; this is the case in all of the styles mentioned in the Wikipedia article. But the two old inscriptions supposedly in Khmer script depicted near the top of the same article are both much rounder, and indeed look a good deal like modern Burmese.
To a large extent it’s unclear whether it makes sense to distinguish a lot of the Brahmic abugidas as individual scripts at all. If we were looking at 19th century Western Europe with the same scriptal granularity we look at modern (or indeed 19th century) SE Asia with, we’d have separate English/French/Italian (“Latin”, perhaps), German, and Irish scripts, and maybe a few others if we tried to classify the handwritten forms too…
There is a gradual progression from the Late Southern Brahmi script (often called the Pallava script, though it also draws influences from different parts of India) to the modern Khmer script and indeed many of the Southeast Asian Brahmic scripts. The further you go back, the more they tend to look like each other, and they all tend to be quite round even though the earliest examples are almost exclusively stone inscriptions. So the explanation that the Khmer script is angular because it was carved in stone is unsatisfactory.
Google Books is buggy. Searching for “thunk” gives a bunch of results. Searching for “thunk” with any date range at all gives zero results.
This seems to be a new bug. Oddly, it still works on my rather old iPad, which is inferior for most purposes.
Etched, though? With an acid?
I imagine they mean engraved or chiseled
Which is a perfectly normal meaning of etch, in case that’s not clear!
if you’ve ever been in Cambodia
Or Lowell, Mass.
Etch is borrowed from Dutch etsen from German ätzen, cognate with eat. If I understand the German dictionaries correctly, the German word is still specific to erosion with acid or other chemicals, while the English word has been extended to include scratching or carving with a tool. Possibly David M assumed the English word had the same restriction as the German one.
I will admit to not entirely understanding the mechanism by which the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etch_A_Sketch works, but I don’t think it’s acid-based. German wikipedia FWIW sez that “Etch A Sketch™ ist eine Variante der Zaubertafel,”
Etch A Sketch.
If I understand the German dictionaries correctly, the German word [ätzen] is still specific to erosion with acid or other chemicals
That is so. “etch” as scratching or carving is radieren (“make an etching”) or ritzen (“scratch” in a general sense, not to “make an etching”). Depending on context, radieren (or ausradieren) can also mean “erase”. Radiergummi = rubber eraser.
Zaubertafel.
Not having studied any tonal language, I gave up on the video about half-way through. But the idea that “tone” and “pitch” are quite different made intuitive sense. Never having studied any tonal language I’ve always wondered how you can sing in one, or at least why melodies are not inherently constrained by the tones found in their lyrics. Comments?
As for “round and bubbly” script–I think not enough attention is paid to the influence of the writing medium on the shape and form of various scripts. I remember a book about Linear B making the point that we can be pretty sure, from the shape of the letters, that it was generally written primarily on imported papyrus rather than clay. Of course, all the Linear B we have survives because the clay tablets on which it was inscribed were accidentally fired. It’s clear from their contents that these were short-term accounts, presumably later summed into ledgers. The point here is that we cannot exclude the existence of Cretan and Mycenean literary texts, which naturally did not survive. If we had any we might view Homer quite differently.
Of course, all the Linear B we have survives because the clay tablets on which it was inscribed were accidentally fired.
…and the one batch of (for whatever reason) insufficiently fired tablets that was found by Evans got destroyed shortly after discovery by water dripping from the roof of his storage room. Probably one of the saddest cases of archaeological loss.
Which is a perfectly normal meaning of etch, in case that’s not clear!
The dictionaries I looked at seemed muddy on that question. Personally, I would not describe carving letters into stone as etching.
Etch-a-Sketch was obviously named for the rhyme. It works neither by etching nor by carving. Scraping, more like.
L. Sterne, Sentimental Journey [1768] vol. I. 31: “With a rusty nail he was etching [upon a stick] another day of misery.”
Never said it, but I’ve written who’d’a’ thunk it a few times (mainly to enjoy the apostrophes).
Exactly.
Oh, it varies. In northern China, the tones are simply ignored in singing. (This means the lyrics have to be crafted with some care to remain understandable.) In southern China, the tones don’t merely constrain the melodies, they are the melodies: the traditional Cantonese method is to exaggerate the pitch range of your speaking voice so the three level and three contour tones become distinguishable as six level tones, and if you then say the lyrics that way, you are singing the song.
Google Books date range new bug
It’s now working again for me, at least if I go through the Advanced Book Search page; the date-range links from ngrams are still broken.