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Tonal vs. agglutinating languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5575 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 9 of 24 02 November 2009 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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My point wasn't trying to argue that English is an agglutinative language. I know it's a fusion language, leaning towards isolating in almost every respect (except noun formation). My point is that there should be nothing unfamiliar about agglutination. It's just the same concept we already know applied to a larger context.
Some thing with tones. They became quite easy to hear, and simple to produce once someone explained to me how 2nd tone was like the inflection at the end of a question, 4th tone was like you're scolding someone, etc. That's all it took to make the whole thing trivially easy. These sorts of things are only difficult if you take the wrong approach to them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 10 of 24 02 November 2009 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tones are tougher going for me.
For the life of me I can't quite detect all of the tones in a tonal language. I tried to pick up some Cantonese many years ago but I gave up since I often couldn't express myself or understand anything properly since I kept getting tripped up by tones. In a similar way, I've had some problems with the related phenomenon of pitch-accent in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. Pitch accent isn't tone per se, but inflections or in some instances words in these languages can be distinguished by rising or falling pitch on certain syllables. Agglutination is much easier for me, although how you apply it can be tricky. On one end, Hungarian agglutination was quite easy for me to grasp even though it was the first largely agglutinative language that I studied. Finnish agglutination so far is more complex than in Hungarian but it doesn't compare to how hard it was for me when I was learning Estonian which was my second agglutinative language. In order to apply agglutination in Estonian, you need to know at the very least four forms of a noun or adjective or three forms for a verb. Some case/tense endings attach to one stem, other such endings to a second stem, and still others to a third stem. Before even attaching the endings, you must already know the form of that stem and also which stem to use. Although there are rules about which endings attach to the stems, there's no reliable guide for making a reasonable guess about the form of those stems. Some nouns have two stems that are identical each other, while others have ones that are more distinct from each other. Verbs can be even harder to grasp since the stem forms can differ noticeably between each of the two infinitives and present tense. Agglutination itself was a relatively minor problem (if you can even call it that) since I had to deal with the prerequisite of using and knowing the stem forms, 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5754 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 24 03 November 2009 at 4:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Tones are just normal for me, agglutination just pulls my strings so much to the extent
that I would start floccinaucinihilipilificating people aleatorically! Edited by Qinshi on 03 November 2009 at 4:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| marvolo Tetraglot Newbie Finland Joined 5707 days ago 20 posts - 30 votes Speaks: Finnish*, French, English, Spanish | Message 12 of 24 03 November 2009 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Also we shouldn't forget that there's different levels in tonal and agglutinative languages. I speak Finnish but am afraid of polysynthetic languages such as eskimo-aleut languages. Also the number of tones can vary from 2 to 9-10 (or more?).
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6494 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 13 of 24 03 November 2009 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder that native English speakers have trouble with tones. You guys at least have a lot of vowels which my ears can't distinct and my mouth can't reproduce exactly (once I had hard time telling "greed" - my friend heard "grid", and another time I told him that he looked like a seaman - guess what he heard?) Edited by Siberiano on 03 November 2009 at 11:36am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 14 of 24 03 November 2009 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, "seaman" and "semen" have exactly the same pronunciation in English, so you were probably saying that word
correctly at least. The only way to mix them up would be if you forgot the article, since one noun is countable and the other isn't. Edited by Captain Haddock on 03 November 2009 at 11:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cowlegend999 Groupie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5145 days ago 72 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 15 of 24 03 November 2010 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
well that depends, some people do pronounce seaman as "sea min" however I know many who say "sea man" it's not a very common word, but I suppose it could be confused with semen 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5524 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 16 of 24 03 November 2010 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Heheh, no offense but check the year And I pronounce them both the same Edited by GREGORG4000 on 03 November 2010 at 8:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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