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Alphabet for Tonal Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Player01 Newbie Canada Joined 5039 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes | Message 1 of 11 19 May 2011 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Mandarin Romanizations
1. Gwoyeu Romatzyh - tonal spelling 2. Latinxua Sin Wenz - tonal spelling only when necessary 3. Hanyu Pinyin (Current Standard) - tone marks Vietnamese alphabet 1. Chữ Quốc Ngữ - tone marks The Vietnamese alphabet has up to 6 tone marks in the writing system but I'm not sure if they use spellings. So my question is the speed of reading in tonal alphabets. First, since they have to read all the tone marks so won't that really slow down their reading speed? And on top of that why did the Mandarin and Vietnamese came to favor tone marks over tonal spellings? I also know there exist some European tonal languages but I heard they are mostly "partial-tone marking" This is not another discussion of Chinese characters or "Chinese characters vs romanization". I just wanna learn about how well tonal alphabets can function. Edited by Player01 on 19 May 2011 at 3:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 11 19 May 2011 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Very few people read anything in Pinyin except for single words, so reading speed isn't really an issue. They're sort of the IPA of Mandarin. That said, although I've spent maybe a hundred times as much time reading characters, I still read faster in Pinyin. I don't see why the tone marks would slow down reading anymore than diacritics in languages like Polish do.
Add to the list: Dungan (Mandarin dialect): Don't think they use tone marks at all (someone confirm this?) Cantonese Yale: Uses tone marks and spelling. An 'h' after the vowel denotes a low tone, tone mark shows tone contour. Cantonese Jyutping (emerging standard): Uses tone numbers (ngo3 m4 sik1 se2 hon3 zi6). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| indiana83 Groupie United States ipracticecanto.wordp Joined 5489 days ago 92 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Italian | Message 3 of 11 19 May 2011 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||
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The question could be simplified to "how hard is it to read Spanish or French", as they also have diacritics such as ñ or ç.
Or maybe - and this is a stretch - how slow do you read English (having to know 26 letters) versus if there were fewer (such as Italian, which only has 22 letters)? edit: to clarify my point: From those I've talked to who learned tonal languages natively, they often don't represent the tones in their head as a single letter having multiple tone marks. They think of them as actual separate letters. So they don't see a single letter "o" with 4 different tone marks above it, they see 4 different letters that each have an "o" as part of writing the letter. Edited by indiana83 on 19 May 2011 at 8:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 11 19 May 2011 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
This reminds me of a strange fact concerning dictionaries. In some languages each diacritical variant is seen as a separate letter, for instance Polish and Icelandic. This means for instance that all words that start with an A come before the words that start with an Á in an Icelandic dicitonary (á is a diphtong up there). On the other hand those languages that only see the ´ as an accent marker typically mix a's and á's. In German it seems that letters with 'Umlaut' ( ¨ ) generally are treated in this manner. In Danish we have the strange situation that we have the letter å, which definitely is treated as a separate letter (actually at the far end of the alphabet, where a is at the front end). But the digraph "aa" is mostly alphabetized as a variant of å, fra from all the single a's. There are also a number of cases in European alphabets where a digraph is seen as a separate entity, such as the Spanish ll which follows right after the l, or Catalan which even has a special sign to tell when ll isn't a digraph: people have actually written whole essays about this. How do the Asian tonal languages deal with the question of alphabetical order? Edited by Iversen on 19 May 2011 at 12:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 11 19 May 2011 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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First of all, we don't read letters or words in isolation, we read them as groups. In other words, you could remove the tones from the Vietnamese example you gave and native speakers would still know right away how to say it. Second, Mandarin doesn't make tones in any way. Only the systems meant to teach foreigners use diacritics, and sometimes they use numbers.
As for alphabetical order, there is usually a set order in which the tones are presented (I know they are numbered 1 to 4 in Mandarin). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 11 19 May 2011 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
To elucidate: the order would be alphabetical for the first syllable, and then by tone number, so 'xian4' would come before 'xiao1' (sorry, can't do tone marks here), even though the tone mark is over the 'a'. But 'xian1 sheng1' would come before xian4 chang3', even though 'c' comes before 's' in the alphabet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5552 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 8 of 11 20 May 2011 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
Vietnamese has diacritics that change the sound (â /ə/ vs. a /a:/, ô /o/ vs. o /ɔ/, although I disagree with those IPA symbols) and diacritics that change the tone (á, à, ả, ã, ạ), and these can be combined to produce the infamous diacritical stacking of this language (ẫ, ồ, ể, ắ, ữ etc.). The diacritics that mark sound differences are indeed treated as separate vowels, but the tone marks are just treated as special marks that get added to the vowel, like an accessory. So a Viet dictionary starts with A, followed by Ă and then Â. The word "áy náy" (last word in the A section) is followed by "ắc-quy", "ắt" (last word in the Ă section) is followed by "âm", etc etc. Whereas if "ắc-quy" were spelt "ác-quy", it would come way before "áy náy", as there is no separate section for words that start with Á because the acute accent indicates tone, not sound. Does that make sense? Lol hard to explain. I know Chinese "alphabetizes" based on the radicals used to draw the character. Then again that isn't really alphabetization as it's the symbols that are getting organized, not really the words. I wonder if Chinese even has alphabetization? Edited by kyssäkaali on 20 May 2011 at 4:36am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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