ktravula – a travelogue!

Break Time/Tone

I will not blog much this week because I feel a little overwelmed. On the bright side, I have Steve Jobs’ authorized biography to get through to take some of the stress off, along with a few other materials in my thesis development.

On that last bit, a question for language students: does anyone have a guess as to why (American) English speakers have problem with tone in language? Yes, they are not used to tone languages because English is intonational. But they never have such problem with music which also works with tone levels, so what’s going on? Here’s more, when researchers who have looked at the matter say that one of the reasons for poor tonal acquisition by American/English learners is the limited “pitch range” of such learners, what exactly do they mean? English speakers are humans too and pitch is physiological and not something tied to race or skin colour. I have looked everywhere online for information about this and I haven’t come up with much.

I can do with some brainstorming session here.

Break Time/Tone was published on November 1st, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Ramblings on Tone

What can be observable in the process of acquisition of tones by L1 speakers of English? Chinese (and a host of other languages in South East Asia) already gives us an enormous database of observable patterns. African languages (in this case Yoruba) occupy another level of the problematic realm for those merely accustomed to a language based on intonation, stress and inflections. Why is it funny when my friends call me in a way that rhymes my name with Cola or “caller” rather than with the uptalk mode of pronouncing the “sugar” in “sugar daddy” or the “brother” in “brotherly love”. Tone is music, rising and falling as needed. What makes it imperative that speakers of English relate to it only in one direction, viz (usually) as a high-low in a two syllable word? Why will “Bolaji” sound like “allergy” rather than the “beautiful” in “beautiful girl”?

What other nuggets are observable? How much proficiency can an L1 English speaker really acquire in a tonal language like Yoruba? With the many years of study by people like Karin Barber and (perhaps) Susanne Wenger, could they/did they pass the native-like proficiency test? What is the bar for native-like proficiency anyway?; and besides the general list of impediments across second language learning processes, what are the specifics in L2 tonal language learning that presents the greatest obstacles? And how does it happen? It is after all equally easy, equally difficult to learn any language either at L1 or L2 level given an equal and sustained level of interest and low affective filter. Jargons, jargons.

A linguist might know, or at least be neck deep in the long process of finding out.

Ramblings on Tone was published on May 21st, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.