Tones and Tongue-Twisters



This week's Chinese Unit demonstrated the amazing versatility of the Mandarin word 'ma' . According to how you say it, it can mean mother, hemp, horse, to scold or to indicate that a sentence is a question.

By chance, the text book my Chinese teacher uses includes a number of so-called 'tongue twisters', and this week's example is relevant.

The examples are : mother scolds the horse,(in bold) then underneath:

mother grows hemp, I put the horse to pasture, the horse eats hemp and (repeated) mother scolds the horse.

While we native speakers and writers delight in the many near-synonyms in the English language, it's a cause for confusion and mistakes for second language learners.

How much simpler it seems at first to discover that Chinese doesn't have all these variations. Instead of 'see', 'watch', 'glance', 'view' 'scrutinise', etc, etc the single word in Chinese is 'kan'.

Exactly what kind of seeing is taking place is indicated by an additional word, e.g. kan shi=watching TV, kan shu=reading a book, kan haizi=looking after a child. You add the nuances yourself; after all, everybody knows watching over a child is not the same as reading a book.

But we know from recent Course Units - at least the language sections - that Mandarin is able to be economical with its single-syllable parts of speech because any one of them can have four or five different meanings. It all depends on the tone.

If you are not familiar with the sounds, or if, like one unfortunate class-mate of mine, you are tone-deaf, it can be difficult to appreciate the differences. So I want to repeat descriptions that I found helpful:

First Tone

The first tone resembles the first note - doh- of the music scale. It helps to imagine you are singing the sound, like a contralto (in my case) doing a warming warming up exercise.

Second Tone

The second tone is a rising one, and you can imagine a question such as 'What?' or 'Who?'

Third Tone

The third tone has two sounds, a fall followed by a rise. The best way I know to describe this is Dame Edith Evans saying 'Handbag?' in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

Fourth Tone

The fourth tone is a sharp falling sound, as in 'Stop?' or 'Don't', as you might say it to a naughty child.

The example from the book includes the so-called voiceless or fifth tone, as the second syllable of mama . It's aachieved by compressing the lips and then opening them as you say the English 'schwah' sound, like the 'uh' in 'after'

With tone numbers, the examples would read: (in bold) ma1 ma ma4 ma3

Then: ma1 ma zhong3 ma2, wo3 qu4 fang4 ma2, ma1 chi1 le ma2, ma1 ma ma4 ma3

The voiceless fifth tone 'ma' at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.

I'm glad I don't learn Cantonese, the Hong Kong dialect - that, I believe, has nine tones!