Patience in Tones Brings Music to Mandarin
Have you ever wondered why some languages sound more musical than others? Or why Chinese people learning to speak English seem to all make the same “mistakes”? Learning about tones will help this start to make sense. Sometimes the rise and fall in pitch occurs naturally as one pronounces each word; sometimes the changes in pitch are due to changes in the speaker’s emotions; and sometimes pitch changes are built into the languages themselves. Tones represent the rise and fall of pitch in a sentence. Tones are not very common in English sentences, except when we ask a question, in which case the sentence ends with a rise in pitch. But in Chinese, different tones are woven throughout a sentence and add a layer of lyrical beauty to Chinese languages. In my previous post on Chinese puns, I explored the overlap in pronunciation among Chinese characters, which leads to Chinese people’s penchant for puns. For example, the pronunciation “ma” could mean mother, numb, horse, and scold. How can we distinguish which is which? Context plays a very important role in Chinese sentences, but another way to distinguish characters of the same pronunciation is by tones.
