I can definitely see that. One of the things I've noticed is that if the use of tones doesn't yet come naturally to the speaker, it can slow down their speech to the point it can sometimes be com pared some what to spea king Eng glish one syl la ble at a time, which makes things more difficult to understand because it's less clear from the rhythm where one word ends and the next one starts, and the listener can more easily forget the earlier parts of the sentence due to the combination of the time delay and the extra cognitive load. (Also, new speakers tend to exaggerate tones more than usual, which unintuitively also tends to make it harder to understand.) In contrast, it's easier for native speakers to understand "tone-less" Chinese more easily because tone-less Chinese is already pretty common in everyday life: Songs can't usually be sung with tones intact, so understanding song lyrics by ear necessarily requires the listener to be able to identify words from context without tone being present.

@@william_sun Interesting point regarding song lyrics. I hadn't considered that but it does make a lot of sense!

@@vikiai4241 There are other contexts as well. If you're shouting or whispering, tonal distinction can easily get lost, but the language can still be understood. A good analogy is whispering. If you whisper properly, you don't produce voiced consonants, meaning, theoretically, "Pat the bat in the bag on the back" would come out as "Pat the pat in the pack on the pack." Realistically, since combinations like that are somewhat unlikely, context normally allows it to be clear what is being intended, just as you can understand a ventriloquist even though they cannot produce many phonemes in their acts.

Chinese tones tend to merge and flow into each other in speech, unlike say Vietnamese or Cantonese, which doesn't do that. So you could be pronouncing all the tones as they would be pronounced in isolation, thereby pronouncing it unnaturally. This makes it really hard to understand. A good example of not entirely correct but get the flow speech would be John Cena. An example of someone that tries to pronounce everything is Mark Zuckerberg. He speaks really slowly, so it helps but it still requires a lot of attention to figure out what he is saying.

@@keith6706 In English, aspiration helps. Whisper "pa, pa, pa", then whisper "ba, ba, ba". The first one's aspirated, and the second one isn't.

I think it is a good use of this sort if thing.

I think it's a good way, or at least a perfectly legitimate one. My love affair with natlang linguistics began with conlanging and each one helps me understand the other better

oh gods a tonal French lol

bòjour, mò ami àglái

@@lukesmith8896 I tried to pronounce it, and yup, it sounds very weird 😂

French had already inherited stresses from Latin, but then managed to yeet those out later. No lexical tone or stress, just prosodic tone/stress.

@@samuelmarger9031 yup

Punjabi native speaker and Punjabi teacher here! You are exactly right! The letter ਘ (gh) for example, in the beginning of a word is pronounced like a kà (high-falling) and at the end like a ga (level tone). ਘਰ - ghar /kàr/ ਸਿੰਘ - singh /sing(a)/ I was really hoping this video would mentioned Punjabi because of its uniqueness in being the only alive IE language with tones, so I'm happy to see another (presumably) Punjabi speaker in the comments

@@theguy5898 Not the only IE languages with phonemic tonality, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Limburgish have or at least in most dialects have tonal qualities more or less. :)

@@jasminekaram880 all of those have only pitch accent, not tone. There's a difference. Btw Serbo-Croatian speaker here. Edit: it's Slovene, not Slovenian.

@@wtc5198 I know quite a few linguists consider “pitch-accent” to just be a restricted tonal system, especially the Norwegian-type (which includes Serbo-Croatian) where it is commonly analysed as a marked tone attaching to the stress.

Not true

the irregular outcome of the checked tone after voiceless obstruents is only really found in Mandarin. Other Sinitic languages (and I believe, even more peripheral varieties of Mandarin) tend to have pretty regular correspondences, so given Mandarin's unique sociolinguistic position compared to the rest of Sinitic, the dialect mixing explanation seems pretty solid

Tonogenesis is also not the end all be all of tonal evolution. Tonogenesis can cover evolution of nontonal language to tonal languages, but tonal natlangs have tone sandhi systems which we have no good theory on their development. For example, compare Hokkien and Mandarin tone sandhi, these came from the same original language and couldn't be more different with their tone sandhi. Further (except for Cantonese), every real tonal language has a tone sandhi system and I would argue that a tone sandhi system is what REALLY sells a tonal language, more than the existence of tones itself Edit: Yes, even Vietnamese, see my comments below. It is difficult to notice tone sandhi if you speak a tonal language natively for various reasons.

@@sciencyazn1509 there are plenty of tonal languages that don't have any form of tone sandhi, the entire Kra-Dai family lacks it entirely as does the nearby Vietnamese

@@multinet9037 from wikipedia's tone Sandi page: "Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways."

400 kms are (better: were) a huge distance in China, unless you were on the Grand Canal... In Italy in the same distance you pass from the Gallo-Italic Lombard dialects to properly Italian Tuscan.

Same! I was making a tonal language yesterday!

Well, considering 13 thousand people already have watched it, the likelihood that someone just started working with tones is very likely. So I wouldn't say it was a timing, if it was inevitable.

💀

That’s called grammatical tone and it would be interesting to see in a future video. This video only discussed lexical tone.

My friend, look up Iau (it’s a natlang in Papua New Guinea). One of the few languages I keep physical copies of articles of so that I can prove I didn’t dream it up.

Iau or Turu now has a detailed Wikipedia entry if you care to take a look.

Chichewa would like a chat, lol (Seriously though look up Chichewa grammar on Wikipedia if you want you brain to explode, it's more in-depth than the articles on most European languages)

I think Old Chinese had a bit of this? I recall a number of characters simply being endoactive/exoactive versions of each other according to the etymology section on wiktionary.

That's called opera singing

Have you ever heard of whistling speech?

I AM GROOT

Birdsong

I just made a stupid and ridiculous conlang outline based on this idea. It is absolutely not a naturalistic language. If anyone wants to make this into an artlang or personal language or something, feel free to use it. It has an extreme number of vowel-related phonetics so that the number of unique syllables will be large, despite the lack of consonants. ~~~~~ Phonology: Vowel Qualities: ⟨i⟩ [i] ⟨ı⟩ [ɯ] ⟨ü⟩ [y] ⟨u⟩ [u] ⟨e⟩ [e] ⟨ë⟩ [ʌ] ⟨ö⟩ [ø] ⟨o⟩ [o] ⟨ä⟩ [æ] ⟨a⟩ [ɑ] Vowel Length: - normal, half long, and long - half long indicated by double vowel, long by triple vowel - ⟨e⟩ [e], ⟨ee⟩ [eˑ], ⟨eee⟩ [eː] Nasality: - normal and nasalized - nasalization indicated by tilda - ⟨e⟩ [e], ⟨ẽ⟩ [ẽ] ~~~ ⟨ë⟩ [ʌ], ⟨ë̃⟩ [ʌ̃] Modality: - modal, breathy, and creaky - breathy indicated by ⟨h⟩ at end of word, creaky indicated by ⟨x⟩ - ⟨e⟩ [e], ⟨eh⟩ [ḛ], ⟨ex⟩ [e̤] Diphthongs and Triphthongs: - ⟨i⟩ [i̯] and ⟨u⟩ [u̯] can come before and after a vowel - ⟨e⟩ ⟨ei⟩ ⟨eu⟩ ⟨ie⟩ ⟨ue⟩ ⟨iei⟩ ⟨ieu⟩ ⟨uei⟩ ⟨ueu⟩ ~ all vowel lengths can occur this way ~ ⟨ieu⟩ ⟨ieeu⟩ ⟨ieeu⟩ Tones: - random, because this is just for fun - indicated by IPA tone numbers 1-5 Vowel Harmony: - no, my brain already hurts (even though the vowels are an unholy combination of Turkic languages and Korean) ~~~~~ Grammar: - SVO, Analytical (like Chinese languages) ~~~~~ Sample: Aaa132 ieuh51 ii5 uã32 uööi5 ia53 oux21 oux21 ĩ3 aa113. Ẽh31 üüi335 iı1 iı1 ë̃ë̃x113 ioi553 aa51. [ɑː˩˧˨ i̯ḛu̯˥˩ iˑ˥ u̯ã˧˨ u̯øˑi̯˥ i̯a˥˧ o̤u̯˨˩ o̤u̯˨˩ ĩ˧ ɑˑ˩˩˧] [ḛ̃31 yˑi̯˧˧˥ i̯ɯ˩ i̯ɯ˩ ʌ̤̃ˑ˩˩˧ i̯oi̯˥˥˧ ɑˑ˥˩.] these are just random nonsense syllables, so no translation/gloss ~~~~~ If you really want to hurt your brain, read the phonology section of the "Jalapa Mazatec" article on Wikipedia. I used that as a large inspiration for this, as it has the most complicated vowel system of any language I have seen so far (in my opinion).

Iirc, Scandinavian tones developed from peak delay. Basically, stress in Proto-Germanic was believed to have a falling contour. Proto-Germanic was also polysyllabic like IE Languages. However in the transition to North Germanic, much of the unstressed syllables were lost creating many monosyllabic words. In the remaining polysyllabic words, the tone shifted one syllable back, creating Scandinavian Tone 2. In some monosyllabic words ending in a resonant, an epithetic vowel was added but did not affect tonal placement, creating tone 1

​@@henrywong2725 wasn't PG stress initial? how could it have moved back?

@@wtc5198 by “back” I meant “right” :p

@@henrywong2725 ah ok that makes sense, thank you

Tonal War: Three Contours.

I’m watching this while making letters for my language So far I only got the vowels but I’m getting the plosives now

wah baru tau saya pdhl sy orng jawa wkwk

I hope he is, I speak a pitch accent language and have always wanted to create a conlang with pitch accent.

That's kind of how it works, as I understand it. In theory, you have these nice distinct tone levels that are the yardstick for all tones, but when you actually use tones in real speech, they slightly alter eachother. This is why tones aren't like musical notes. If I play Eb on a flute in a variety of different musical contexts, it will always sound the same no matter what other notes are near it. If I speak a rising tone that goes from level 2 to level 5 in a variety of tonal contexts, it will have allophonic differences depending on the surrounding tones. For instance if we had a rising toneme LH with an allophonic variation MH following a high tone, then the phonemes /ba(LH) ba(LH)/ would actually be pronounced [ba(LH) ba(MH)], but the distinction would never differentiate words because it's contextual. Hopefully that's not too confusingly explained.

@@Salsmachev while my friend was learning Mandarin, what I was told about tones is it's relative to the person's mid-tone during the conversation. What I was thinking of is that it doesn't matter what the person's mid-tone is, or even if it is a mid-tone, just that the sound is rising, falling, or flat. So it could be L and a MH in the same word, but the L is the same as though it were an M, but because it doesn't change, it's just a flat.

​@@HuffleRuff Yes, but there's a difference between how we describe tonemes versus their actual realisation in phonetic environments. Let me give a non-tone example. In English we have both aspirated and unaspirated p, like in pot and spot respectively. They're a single phoneme though, because there's a perfectly predictable pattern to which one you use. You'd never aspirate the p in spot, for example. So aspirated and unaspirated p are allophones of a single phoneme. You can (and do) get multiple allotones of a toneme the same way you get multiple allophones of a phoneme. So a toneme that's pronounced LH by default might have a predictable MH pronunciation in certain environments as well. For the purposes of a phonemic transcription (or a language textbook), we'd just call it a rising tone and not care about whether it's MH or LH, but in a phonetic transcription (or a really good language textbook), we'd differentiate and if you used the wrong allotone, native speakers would likely notice. So, for instance, if you used MH after a high tone, it might sound weird the same way that aspirated p in an sp cluster sounds weird. If you're talking about random variation without any underlying phonetic/semantic/grammatical pattern, that's not something that's likely to occur in a natural language.

@@Salsmachev not talking random variation.

@@Salsmachev It doesn't detract from your example but musicians playing Eb in a slightly different way depending on context IS a thing, especially on (unfretted) strings. On things with fixed buttons/frets it's instead about tuning to adapt to the key you're in. It's because the modern equal temperament tuning is a compromise and actually "pure" intervals will not neatly line up with a 12 tone scale, so playing by ear on an instrument that allows it you will naturally adapt to what key or even chord you're playing at the moment

It might be worth noting that even in Cantonese, 肥肥地 and 瘦瘦地 are pronounced fei4-fei2-dei2 and sau3-sau2-dei2 instead of fei4-fei4-dei2 and sau3-sau3-dei2. On another note - if it's not too personal of question, do you work with languages professionally? And if yes, what do you do with them? I'm also interested in linguistics and Sinitic languages specifically, although I can't yet boast with really speaking more than one of them. I'd love to have some "perspective" on what one can do with those interests.

@@bioniclegoblin6495 @Bioniclegoblin this is actually not considered tonal sandhi (arguably?). Granted I'm not familiar enough with this to say, but if you pair up the characters and become a different word AND the tones are slightly different that's not considered sandhi for various reasons. I don't know if this reduplication changes the meaning, so you'd have to be the judge. I do not work in linguistics, translating, interpretation, or language coaching. Linguistics and language learning are a hobby of mine, particularly Sinitic languages for their tonal sandhi and I am working towards learning a language of each major tonal sandhi type in China and then a few other languages in Asia. I do not professionally work with languages

@@sciencyazn1509 Thanks for your answer anyway! As for the Cantonese, while this case of tone change doesn't count as tone sandhi, I find it an interesting example of the "extra features" of a tonal language. Good luck with your language leaning!

No tonal sandhi in Vietnamese either. We have a maximum of six tones, and by and large things stay where they are.

@@d.b.2215 my comments are being deleted because I'm sending a link or something. But Vietnamese has tone sandhi. I cite: Stress and tone Sandhi in Vietnamese Reduplications by Anh-Thu T. Nguyen and John C. L. Ingram (it's online, but I can't post it because of the link ban) If you speak a tonal language natively, you are almost never going to notice tone sandhi. I didn't realize I spoke a language with tone sandhi until I started studying linguistics and Hokkien. Indeed, in Vietnamese the tone sandhi is not as prominent, but even in languages with crazy tone sandhi like Hokkien, natives do not notice any tone sandhi.

Pitch-accent is basically basic tone covered in the video. Some languages have additional rules while others don't

@@eugeneng7064 Eh... I'd describe it more as tonal languages apply tone at the syllable level, but pitch accent languages applying it at the word level. E.g. polytonic Greek only distinguishing rising/falling on the stressed syllable

@@justineberlein5916 so how does this work with tonal languages like Mandarin which have toneless syllables? Or syllables where the tone disappears? Or word level (not syllable) tone?

@@eugeneng7064 pitch accent languages only ever have tone on the stressed syllable

@@wtc5198 Japanese has no stress but is considered to have pitch accent. Mandarin has similar things to unstressed syllables but is not pitch accent

Similar for me. I could produce tones with little effort, but using them using them lexically is so counter-intuitive to me that I'd have to always read the words with tones marked to not mix anything up... and guess their meanings from those differentiated just by tone. As for the sounds, the only problem I have with consonants is mixing up those more exotic from my POV. The vowels though... I can never remember which "exotic" vowel was which, because bunches of them sound largely the same to me :D Heck, I'm not sure about the English vowels, but that's not my native language - I can't even tell which IPA vowel is the "y" in my native Polish :D So yeah, no fancy vowels nor tones for my conlangs, all the fun is in those unusual consonants.

Learning to pronounce a new sound is considerably easier than tones I think.

Most syllabic consonants in Southern Sinitic had an associated vowel in their earlier stages that got deleted. However, the tone still remains after vowel deletion and attached itself to the new consonant

Taiwanese Hokkien: "Don't you just want to go ape shitt"

I don't know. The latter is much more likely, but I think it would be interesting to see consonants influenced by tones, followed by tone loss.

IIRC the unaspirated stops in Navajo are allphonically voiced before low tone-vowels but voiceless before high tone-vowels.

It's more common for tones to just disappear without a trace, causing a bunch of mergers.

Often when time is lost the artifacts are phonation (creaky voice, breathy voice etc) on the vowels.

Interesting observation. Would you perhaps have a link to the song (or at least the song name)?

@@rauhamanilainen6271 Well description says Udo Grunewald. The few videos I found on YT does have some microtonal stuff and funky rythms in there so it fits, but I couldn't find the specific track, so it's not 100% that it's him (very likely though, it's a pretty unique name I'm guessing)

Not all variations of Swedish even have this semi-tonality, whereas all forms of Chinese are tonal.

pitch accent systems and systems with largely independent tones on each syllable are very much on a sliding scale. Whilst languages like Mandarin is usually conceived of as having independent tones on each syllable, some syllables are atonal, and tone sandhi effects (which I believe will be discussed next video) lead to the tone in one syllable being at least partially controlled by the tone in another more prominent syllable. In Shanghainese (a variety of Wu Chinese, not Mandarin), this tone sandhi is so complete that the tone in the first syllable of a word almost always fully determines the tone in the following syllables (with a few cases where the earlier tones are determined by a later one instead), which sounds an awful lot like a pitch accent system obviously in Swedish the pitch accent is still carrying far less functional load (there are nowhere near as many minimal pairs as in Mandarin for instance), but the fact that something like Shanghainese can develop from the same place as Mandarin's tones (with various Sinitic varieties occupying a wide range of space between the two) and end up somewhere with a "tonal" system very close to a Baltic style "pitch accent" system (which are themselves, only a little more complicated than Swedish's, allowing a few different tones on the accented syllable) shows that these shouldn't really be considered distinct entities, but opposite extremes on a sliding scale

Theres more tonality in swedish than just pitch accent, a bunch of words can radically change meaning if you get the pitch wrong. Do it wrong, and you will end up saying weird stuff that might be hard to figure out even with decent context.

@@hamstsorkxxor That's just not true though. Let's take the number one cited example in Swedish, "anden" (the duck or the spirit). The only time you wouldn't know what was being said without correct use of pitch accent is when the word is being said alone, used in a sentence the context would always be crystal clear. Even if you said the word on its own, people would probably immediately know you're trying to touch upon the subject of pitch accent. And as mentioned above, not even all dialects of Swedish have pitch accent, but they all have these words.

@@hamstsorkxxor how isn't that pitch accent?

Navajo has (register) tone. Most pitch accent languages are synthetic. I'm not sure about real contour tone languages

@@wtc5198 thanks :)

I know the feel. I come from a math background, so I have no formal training in linguistics at all. What worked for me was to binge a lot of the earlier videos (especially the "how to make a language" videos) on both Artifexian and Biblaridion's channels, then to go to Wikipedia whenever I couldn't guess at a word's meaning. Between the earlier conlanging videos and Wikipedia, I was able to pick up on quite a lot. I still get confused sometimes, but I understand enough to be able to conlang effectively.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n8d4jKyJp9ywaWg.htmlfeature=shared Here

Yes, in Scandinavia, tones develop from peak delay. Basically it is believed that Proto-Germanic’s stress had a falling contour which was inherited into North Germanic. Proto-Germanic had many polysyllabic words that became monosyllabic in North Germanic. In the remains polysyllabic words, the falling contour shifted one syllable back, creating tone 2. Later, certain monosyllabic words gained an epithetic vowel but did not shift the tone back, creating tone 1. Pitch-accent is also a terrible label because it conflates two very distinct types of tone systems and force-fits them into a stress-like analysis.

Entirely plausible, and I know there are examples, though I can't recall specific ones at the moment. The pitch (and pitch contour) of sounds, as indicated in this video, is an important component of phonetics in all languages - it just often isn't *phonemic.* Vowels are indeed distinguished partially by pitch differences (e.g. back vowels are lower than front vowels), so it's entirely plausible these could be reanalyzed as purely tonal differences.

Burmese, I think, some language in that area I'm sure but I think it's Burmese, maybe Thai

The Chatino languages have complex onsets, as well as tones. Nivkh also breaks this correlation somewhat. In the Karuk language, an interesting effect is found where the language allows both tone and complex syllables, but that placement of tone in a word largely avoids complex syllables.

@@the_linguist_ll Neat.

Yes, but I think that that's usually if those languages had tone to start with and therefore didn't have to go through consonant loss

That is the same in just about every non-tonal language.