Piotr:
>I discuss the difference in the following on-line article:
>
>http://www.geocities.com/caraculiambro/Caraculiambro/Stress.html
>
>In popular usage any pitch contrast may be called "tone", but >linguists
>reserve the term for contastive pitch functioning in a >special way,
>independently of stress or accent.
Yeah, it kinda reminds me of a Mandarin course I took. If I remember right,
in Mandarin, "bicycle" is written in Pinyin notation as /zi4-xing2-che1/
(number indicates one of the four tones). But the tones here aren't strictly
adhered to in normal speech. When I heard my teacher say the word, I not
only heard the tones of each individual syllable but I distinctively heard
her put stress on the second syllable. In this case, I would gather that
Chinese "stress" involves a more severe tone and a greater length of the
syllable. I heard this again from one friend of mine, a native Mandarin
speaker from mainland China, when we pronounced for me /ma1ma1/ "mother"
which sounded more like /ma:m@/.
Tonal languages are tres cool. English is mucho lame-oh.
- gLeN
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