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A question about Danish... | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Skandinavisk & Nordisk |  | |
| Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4416 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes  Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian | Message 9 of 11 01 June 2012 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think all spoken languages use pitch in some way. E.g., I would guess that questions and statements have different pitch patterns in most languages. But in only relatively few languages (afaik) does the tone change the meaning of individual words. In Swedish this is true of some word pairs - anden (the duck, the spirit), tomten (the lot, the elf). Notice - and = duck, ande = spirit, tomt = lot (as in parking lot), tomte = elf (the Santa's elf sort of elf). But not all dialects have these tones. I think in Finnish Swedish these word pairs are identical. As you can see, the potential for confusion is limited. ("Den heliga anden" is a possible source of humor - the Holy Spirit - or Duck.)
I'm not aware of any similar phenomenon in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4497 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 10 of 11 01 June 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think what people may be referring to are pairs like present, meaning gift, and present, to give or show (e.g., I'll give you a present before I present these slides). Or the address at which you live, and the address the president's going to give the nation tonight. ...Or how math is your worst subject in school, and how could the teacher subject you to his lectures which seem to never end? This site has a long list of English words where a change in stress changes the meaning of the word. Some of these pairs don't support this thread at all (as in, the noun is simply verbified when the emphasis shifts to another syllable), but with some the shift produces a very significant change in meaning. Edited by Hekje on 01 June 2012 at 11:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4622 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 11 of 11 01 June 2012 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good point. Maybe it's stress that's more important in English, and certainly can change meaning. Nevertheless, I think tone/intonation can also change meaning, sometimes in subtle ways that are hard to classify. And on a slightly different tack, someone used to tell me the story of the foreign learner of English who, seeing a newspaper placard announcing "Cavalcade [Musical by Noël Coward] pronounced success", got on the next boat home, as he knew he'd never master English :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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