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Norwegian Pitch Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 33 of 42 09 December 2012 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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(sans-serif, do you remember where you found this useful info? Swedish is actually a higher priority for me than Norwegian, because I want to live in Finland *_* ) Edited by Serpent on 09 December 2012 at 12:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4666 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 34 of 42 09 December 2012 at 12:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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''However, if the stressed syllable of a word of this kind is not the nucleus of a tone unit (the domain of the toneme), the toneme will not be realized, and the tonemic distinction will be neutralized. For this reason, neutralization occurs in compound words with first-syllable stress where the second element is a word normally marked for toneme; for example the difference between "bønder" (farmers; toneme 1) and the segmentally identical "bønner" (beans; toneme2) is neutralized in the compound ['smo:bønər], which has toneme 2; this compound can mean either ''small farmers'' or ''small beans''. Furthermore, the functional load of the tonemes in Norwegian is low compared to that found in other tone languages. First, toneme realizations occur in a minority of syllables: in Vanvik's transcription of the IPA's 'North Wind and the Sun's passage, representing a relatively careful reading style in which the proportion of realized tonemes should be high, toneme realizations occur 37 times, there being a total of 135 syllables in the text. Secondly, there are very few cases in running speech where the misinterpretation of tonemes could lead to misunderstanding (Fintoft 1970). '' - ''Our third linguistic variable derives from the observation made by a number of dialectologists that the dialects surrounding Bergen lack the contrast between two lexical word-tones, found in nearly all varieties of Norwegian and Swedish. '' source: Dialects Converging: Rural Speech in Urban Norway By Paul Kerswill (via Google Books) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4557 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 35 of 42 09 December 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Does that also mean you want to learn finlandssvenska? I used two books I found in the library: Svenskt uttal för finskspråkiga and Orden och uttalet. Especially the former was a great read, and covers both rikssvenska and finlandssvenska. The problem with these, and most other books on the subject that I've seen, is that they're in Swedish. I already had a pretty good level in the language when I decided I wanted to learn the Swedish pronunciation, so this wasn't a problem for me. Hmmh... I hadn't actually even thought about this. Edited by sans-serif on 09 December 2012 at 1:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4666 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 36 of 42 09 December 2012 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The most important thing: the pitch accent and the ''singy'' intonation of a language are two different things.
Norwegian pitchless dialects (in northern and central Hordaland outside Bergen and Voss; and in northern Troms, as well as in Finnmark) still sound very singy and have a very Norwegian intonation. On the other hand, Italian, Czech and (sometimes) Icelandic sound singy too, although they lack the pitch accent. Croatian pitch accents sound flat (and not singy) compared to Norwegian pitchless dialects, and to Czech (which has no pitch, but it sounds very singy, even compared to its ''flat''-sounding neighbor: the Slovak language). So, learners of Norwegian should more concentrate on the general Norwegian ''singy'' intonation, and not the pitch accent itself. As I said, they are two different things. The Norwegian pitch accent is extremely variable, even in the same town/region, two different speakers may have two different phonetic realizations of the tonemes, furthermore in Western Norway the accents are completely opposite to the ones used in Eastern Norway, so when these people communicate, they have to focus on the context. And so far, differences in vocabulary or pronunciation are more likely to cause confusion than differences in tones. That's why no Norwegian courses teach the pitch accent to foreigners (which is similar to the contrast of open and closed E's and O's in Italian, because pèsca [with an open E] means a peach in Florence, but fishing in Milan and Venice, and pésca [with a closed E] means fishing in Florence, but a peach in Milan and Venice, native speakers from different regions have to focus on the context and not on the phonetic values of these vowels, therefore, most Italian courses say: open - close E/O contrast is extremely variable in Italy, that's why you should not bother with it; the same applies for the Norwegian pitch accent, I guess]. I tried to hear /identify tones in the Oslo speech. But, I came to a conclusion, that the exact identifying is possible only in slow(-paced) speech , (when a person is over-pronouncing). When people speak fast (most native speakers do), sentence intonation can superpose on the individual word phonemes, and mask them, so a objective listener (non-Norwegian) cannot identify the individual word tones in connected speech. Most of the time, people speak by using sentences, and not isolated words. And most of the time, native speakers speak fast, and not slow. Compare these two speakers: Icelandic, no pitch, but very singy intonation: http://youtu.be/up3xkk4oQDk?t=1m15s Norwegian, pitch accent, but very flat-sounding: http://youtu.be/Et_ZcQHzK2U?t=0m38s Edited by Medulin on 09 December 2012 at 4:07pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 42 09 December 2012 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly! Of course I'm reading this with Swedish eyes. Tonemes are neither fixed (as in: "in this region, pitch #2 always raises from and A up to a C#" - I've seen people make wild assumptions based on a single sound sample), nor identical for all persons. I'm sure I can come up with a dozen words where I don't use the same pitch as my parents. What's considered high-low will come out as low-high in another region, or vice versa. The only thing we can do as learners is to expose ourselves to a lot of audio, highlight words that stand out and maybe notice how the same pitch accent sounds different. No need to be able to copy them 100%.
Exactly. Nobody speaks in slow-motion. Anything can happen on a sentence level. We stress the elements that carry important information, not each individual words - even if some of them normally would have pitch #2. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6657 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 38 of 42 09 December 2012 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Though there is a set standard for the accent in major swedish dictionaries that include pronunciation and the pitch
is also somewhat important in a sentence. No one is going to think someone means garden when they're talking about santa – but if the pitches are off it's going to sound foreign and unnatural. I don't think that the pitch are so important that anyone will be misunderstood in either Swedish or Norwegian – but the same thing goes for the sj- sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4666 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 39 of 42 11 December 2012 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No pitch (HL for both tonemes) will sound less wrong/foreign than wrong pitch (for example
pronouncing natta as nàttá HLH in Oslo. ) Edited by Medulin on 11 December 2012 at 1:44pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4557 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 40 of 42 12 December 2012 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
(Again, Norwegian's not my specialty, but from what I can tell the pitch accent seems to be very similar to that of Swedish, which I'm not completely clueless about. Please take everything I say with the appropriate amout of salt.)
While, as you pointed out, a language can have a singy intonation without having pitch accent and vice versa, the two are intimately connected in the case of Swedish and (I presume) Norwegian. Here's a simplified version of the model presented in the pronunciation guides I've read: When spoken in isolation, each word exhibits one of the well-defined intonation patterns characteristic of the dialect in question. (= pitch accent or word melody) On the sentence level, speech is divided into prosodic units, that is chunks of words, typically with one word that carries stress. The stressed word is pronounced roughly as it would be in isolation, while the rest of the chunk is breezed through quickly and with more or less flat intonation. In other words, the overall singy intonation of Norwegian and Swedish stems from these stressed words, and thus, from the pitch accent.
I absolutely agree that sentence-level prosody is the real beast, but I don't see how you could get it right without knowing how the pitch accent works. I suppose it's possible to place stress correctly, and get the intonation completely wrong, and that's preferable to the opposite situation, but in my mind it's well worth the effort to study the pitch accent. It's a very winnable battle with the right resources (and here, unfortunately, I can only speak for Swedish). What you said about tones in fast speech is very interesting, if that really is the case with the Oslo dialect, or informal Norwegian in general, for that matter. My experience with Swedish has been that the intonation patterns of stressed words remain reasonably unchanged even in the most colloquial settings, save for some few exceptions--and perhaps this is what you were talking about--where a group of words is realized as if it were a compound. This is quite infrequent, however, and mostly concerns set phrases, so for me it's not a strong argument for learners to disregard pitch accent. All of this is naturally based on just my subjective perceptions, so I hope you don't feel like I'm attacking you here. My current problem is almost the opposite of what you described: I keep hearing word melodies in places where they're not supposed to occur, and half the time I'm not sure if I'm imagining them. :-D P.S. Given how many posts I've had to begin with "I'm only familiar with the Swedish pitch accent, so I could be wrong about this", I think there needs to be a separate thread for it--perhaps it already exists, I didn't check. Whichever the case, it would be great if we could create an introductory guide on the topic, as there's no online resource I'm aware of that covers it in a satisfactory way. Edited by sans-serif on 12 December 2012 at 2:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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