Talk:Tonal language
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[edit] Sources?
Having gone through the article, which is pretty well written, my only complaint is that there are no sources cited. I'm not questioning the accuracy of the contents, but some citations would be nice. Tomertalk 01:51, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Tone (linguistics)
How is this article different from tone (linguistics)? DHN 19:27, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
- Please see Talk:Tone (linguistics)#Article split /Merge. Tonal languages are a completely different subject from the concept of "phonemic" tone in linguistics, and should be treated separately. Tomertalk 23:16, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] tonal vs pitch accented
i thought languages like japanese were pitch accented and not tonal? i thought these were two different things.
- Yes, they are different things, and the article completely fails to appreciate that. Sanskrit, Lithuanian and Serbocroatian are pitch-accent languages, too.
- David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 12:38 CET | 2006/3/19
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- I think It´s very strange to list japanese as a tonal language!... May I remove that? -- NIC1138 03:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Limburgs
This article states "the" tonal languages of Europe, but Limburgs is missing here. Which is ironic, because that page links to this one, and tonality is very prevalent in Limburgs. Since I'm not the linguistics expert (just a native speaker of Limburgs) I'd like to leave it up to the main author or others to amend this. SeverityOne 21:54, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Tonal patterns
Tonal patterns vary widely across languages. In English, one or more syllables are given an accent, which can consist of a loud stress, a lengthened vowel, and a high pitch, or any combination of these. In tonal languages, the pitch accent must be present, but the others are optional. For example, in Czech and Hungarian, the first syllable of each word is stressed, but any syllable may be lengthened, and pitch is not used. In French, no syllable is stressed or lengthened, but the final syllable has high pitch. Turkish similarly has high pitch on the last syllable, but also possesses length and possibly stress. There is much discussion about how much prominence pitch must have in order to label a language tonal.
This paragraph doesn't make any sense to me in this context. None of the languages mentioned in it are tonal. It seems to me that the paragraph describes how stress is expressed, as opposed to tone. I suggest to remove it entirely.
[edit] Hausa
In the "Geography of Tonality" section, it says "Hausa is tonal, although it is a distant relative of the Semitic languages, which are not, so it apparently acquired it during its history." I would like to point out that it is impossible to have not acquired tonality in its history. A rewording would be appropriate. Zendik 20:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Scottish Gaelic
If this is indeed a tonal language, can someone mention this on the Scottish Gaelic page?
[edit] Yucatec?
I'm pretty certain the statements about Yucatec Mayan being a 5-tone language (with contour tones, etc.) are wrong. --Lavintzin 23:54, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
