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0 points_emacsomancer_7y ago0 comments

I agree it's similar in the abstract, but the mechanisms involved are a bit different, at least at the phonetic level. The Mandarin cases will involve rising tone, falling tone, etc. - and English does do some of that, but not at the lexical level (e.g. yes/no questions in English involve a rising tone at the end).

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natch7y ago

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying.

You perhaps have a cartoon level understanding of Chinese tones that causes your confusion. Tones in Chinese aren’t always singsong or rising or falling as you seem to think they must be. They can be subtle (including a neutral tone and very deemphasized uses of all the other tones).

The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.

_emacsomancer_OP7y ago

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

natch7y ago

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently.

However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just my assertions to yours. So I'll wrap up with a fitting quote from Frederick Jelinek: "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up."

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natch7y ago

The real examples I posted contradict what you are saying.

The English examples I posted are quite analogous to tone differences in Chinese in real usage, and your attempts to assert otherwise are lacking relevant evidence.

_emacsomancer_OP7y ago

Evidence would be something concrete: show me an analysis of acoustic waveforms that demonstrates that English stress and Mandarin tone are the same phenomenon. Analogies are not evidence.

natch7y ago

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