2/20/2004 » Musings

Since Chinese is a tonal language, you can convey different words by varying the pitch of the same word. This is an efficient encoding system. Does it lead to the short words and surnames characteristic of Chinese? On the flip side, this means you lose the emotional information conveyed by tone of voice in English. How do Chinese speakers compensate for this, given that you need to use specific sing-song inflections just to convey your meaning? Chinese written ideographs are also heavily compressed, of course.

Japanese, which is not tonal, has lengthier surnames than Chinese. Is this due to lack of tonality, or to Japanese minimalism which makes simple phonemes more aesthetic in that culture, just like Hawaiian?

Spoken French is highly stylized and drops phonemes towards the endings of words. For example, the word for thirty is treinta in Spanish and trente in French. The former is two syllables in Spanish, but the latter is just one syllable in French, the te is silent. Because of all the blurring and truncation, new French speakers can get by in Paris by approximating the correct pronunciation, whereas we'd never manage correct written French. Because of the strong tendency towards homonyms, correctly decoding spoken French requires more context than in most languages. This compression probably makes speech recognition software for French quite complex.

Punjabi is a tonal language like Chinese, although it's not nearly as tonal. Speakers of tonal languages have a high incidence of perfect pitch and a low rate of tone-deafness. Does this account for the musical sounds of rural Punjabi speakers chattering away? And most importantly, is perfect pitch why our music rocks? ;)