Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 May 23
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May 23 edit
Has a linguist made a rough pecking order of languages or accents by "average amount of tone variations and stress"? edit
If you've heard some of the announcements at Rite Aid like "Go Green" and "KidCents charity" you'd know what I'm talking about. The voice actress puts way too much stress on things. Mandarin I think would be up there as it's tonal language with a lot of stressed syllables. I suppose there could be a language that on average sounds like a droning professor to those who know only English? (mood and speaker dependent of course) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:05, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
- Unless one is measuring and graphing absolute frequencies (similar to this), this is a fairly subjective question as pitch, tone, intonation, stress, Isochrony, etc. are perceived relative to other nearby sounds. But for the record, Mandarin's tonal system is fairly simple in comparison to other languages of the world. Languages in Southeast Asia from the Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Lolo-Burmese languages can have as many as nine unique tone contours; the Wobé language of West Africa is reputed (though this is disputed) to have 14 tones; and, in the New World, dialects of the Trique language are said to have up to 16 tones. The exact values of the frequency ranges would have to be measured to find out which one has the greatest distance between the highest high and the lowest low and I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done for all the relevant languages in the world.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 02:39, 23 May 2017 (UTC)