Re: Natural pitches of speech

In article <44b4d006$1_2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, fields
<matt-send-spammers-to-jail-fields@xxxxxxx> wrote:

And region and other things. A native speaker once explained to me that
Norwegian dialects and Swedish dialects are often mutually intelligible,
but for the most part Swedes are more likely to put lilting high notes
on all their unaccented syllables whereas Norwegians speak closer to a
monotone. I find the melodies of Californian, Alabaman, and Scottish
speech more of an initial barrier to comprehension than vocabulary and
shifted vowels. And then there's various Chinese dialects.

Norwegian, Swedish and Chinese have in common that they are tonal languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_languages
For the example where tonal differences alters the meaning of the Swedish
word "anden", see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language
Swedish just has two tonal accents, Chinese four, and Vietnamese, I think
has seven.

--
Hans Aberg
.

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