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Tones in swedish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4388 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 1 of 3 06 November 2013 at 4:41pm | IP Logged |
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How should the process of learning swedish be affected by that fact that it is a tonal language ? Do you
think swedish is generally harder to understand than say German for a foreigner ? I mean many consonants are dropped ,tones and the script is not entirley phonetic , it also seems to me that it is not clearly spoken but it is kind of merged all together .what is your take on that ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 2 of 3 06 November 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged |
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1. Swedish is not a tonal language (like Mandarin or Vietnamese), but it has a pitch accent (like Norwegian, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian)
2. All languages mentioned above have dialects with pitch neutralization (in which tonemes 1 and 2 are realized as toneme 1 (HL = high low), Northwestern Croatian, Finland's Swedish, Nordhordland/Stril Norwegian, Finnmark Norwegian) 3. tonemes are a phonological feature 4. the exact phonetic realization of tonemes is highly dependent on dialectal/regional use (just like stressed vowels O and E in Italian: pèsca is another thing in Milan and another thing in Florence, and pésca as well). 5. the phonetic realization: a) In Scanian region (Malmö/Lund), and in most of Western Norway the general intonation is the falling one, toneme 1 is pronounced as HL, and toneme 2 LHL b) in Western Sweden (Goetheburg) and most of Eastern and Central Norway, toneme 1 is pronounced as LH, and toneme 2 HLH c) in Central Swedish: anden [ˈa᷇ndɛ̀n] or [ˈan˥˧dɛn˩] — 'the duck' (from and 'duck') anden [ˈa᷆ndɛ̂n] or [ˈan˧˩dɛn˥˩] — 'the spirit' (from ande 'spirit') As you can see the toneme 2 in Stockholm is: HLHL (just like in parts of Norway like Stavanger) d) in other parts of Sweden, the melody of the tone 1 and 2 is the same, but the stress/timing is different: tomten ['tɔmtən] vs tomten ['tɔm'ten] e) tonemes are subject to morphologic changes> monosyllabic words (toneme1 in singular) get a tonem 2 plural f) in some variants, the tones of verbal forms are stable, many people in Western Norway and in eastern Norway pronounce all 2 syllabic verbal forms with the toneme 2 (å kaste/kasta - kaster/kastar - kasta/kastet - h. kasta/kastet all these forms have the toneme 2), in other variants infinitive and past forms of 2 syllabic verbs have the toneme 2, but the present form has the toneme 1. The realization is affected by vowel length, melody difference is more important for distinguishing long vowels that carry different tonemes, while in the case of short vowels timing/ secondary stress is more important. Furthermore, tonal differences can be applied to the whole sentence stress/intonation. Just like when you throw one stone into the water, you get one wave, but if you throw three of them, you will get a ''combined'' wave, and not three isolated waves. How tones are put together in a sentence is done by the Trondheim rule: ''In the Trondheim model of intonation, which was developed for East Norwegian by Fretheim in the 1980’s, an Intonation Unit (IU) consists of Intonational Phrases (IPs) headed by accented syllables. An IP consists of one or more Tonal Feet (F) and Prosodic Words (ω), which are two interdependent categories. The Prosodic Word is the domain of the lexical tones (Accent 1 and Accent 2) and dominates all syllables from the stressed syllable to the word boundary. The Foot is the domain of the phrase accent contrast between F[+focal] and F[–focal] and is headed by the ω. The right boundaries of F and ω do not necessarily coincide, since F can be longer. Thus the Foot extends from one lexically accented syllable to the next and contains a tonal accent on its left edge and a phrasal accent aligned at the end of the Foot [1].'' Further reading: Remarks on the Scandinavian tone accent typology http://www.hum.uit.no/tidsskrifter/nordlyd/Nordlyd24/Riad.pd f The Tone-bearing Unit in Swedish and Norwegian http://nora.hd.uib.no/NTT/tbu-paper.pdf Edited by Medulin on 06 November 2013 at 5:42pm 14 persons have voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 3 06 November 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged |
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Now THAT'S a great post on Swedish phonology if ever I saw one!
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