thomblake comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong

55 Post author: sketerpot 10 August 2010 02:24AM

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Comment author: novalis 12 August 2010 04:08:20PM *  0 points [-]

I meant inflection: "Alteration in pitch or tone of the voice." But to avoid confusion in the future, I will try to use the linguist's definitions of these words, since they're more precise.

Also, the Wikipedia article suggests that tone rather than intonation might actually be the correct word, since there is a semantic difference.

Comment author: komponisto 13 August 2010 12:45:31AM *  2 points [-]

I will try to use the linguist's definitions of these words, since they're more precise.

Thank you.

Also, the Wikipedia article suggests that tone rather than intonation might actually be the correct word, since there is a semantic difference.

No; "tone" refers to a phenomenon in certain languages (most famously Chinese) wherein otherwise identical words are distinguished from each other -- in isolation, nothing to do with their placement in a sentence -- by the contour of one's voice when pronouncing them. The kind of contextual variation of pitch that you are talking about -- intonation -- is pretty much universal to human speech in all languages.

Comment author: novalis 13 August 2010 05:39:55PM *  -2 points [-]

Wikipedia says:

English intonation may become semi-lexicalized in common expressions such as "I'unno" (I don't know), and therefore starts to approach the domain of tone.

In this case, "have" is the auxillary verb, rather than the ordinary verb "to posess", and you can tell that by the intonation. That's otherwise identical words distinguished from each other.

Comment author: komponisto 13 August 2010 10:03:16PM *  2 points [-]

Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but I'm puzzled by this reply. It's as if you stopped reading my comment immediately after the phrase "otherwise identical words distinguished from each other", and ignored the next part, which happened to be the most important part. So let me try again, using bold for emphasis:

"tone" refers to a phenomenon in certain languages (most famously Chinese) wherein otherwise identical words are distinguished from each other -- in isolation, nothing to do with their placement in a sentence -- by the contour of one's voice when pronouncing them

Did you actually read the Wikipedia article that you cited? Here's an example it gives from Chinese:

1. mā "mother"
2. má "hemp"
3. mǎ "horse"
4. mà "scold"
5. ma (an interrogative particle)

This should have made it clear that we're talking about a different phenomenon from anything that occurs in standard varieties of English. In Chinese, the intonation pattern of an individual word is actually lexical -- it's a fixed property of the word that applies even when the word is pronounced in isolation, entirely like the pattern of consonant and vowel sounds in the word. The five Chinese words above are not homophones, unlike "have" ("possess") and "have" (auxiliary) in English. The two senses of English "have" can't be distinguished when the word is pronounced by itself.

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