This made me think, and I realized that non-tonal languages actually do have a tonal aspect to them.
Comment on Is there a culture/country that doesn't have sarcasm in its language?
Yaky@slrpnk.net 13 hours ago
(Not first-hand knowledge) I read somewhere that tonal languages such as Chinese make it difficult to express sarcasm the same way Indo-European languages do, with accent and inflection.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 12 hours ago
Non-tonal simply means the denotation isn’t carried by tone.
John McWhorter has a few courses in The Great Courses catalog about language - its pretty fascinating stuff. He covers things like tonal languages, and how even for a linguist like himself, they’re tough to learn.
ZiggyTheZygote@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
True, otherwise it would be monotone, though some people speak in a monotone voice that can put you to sleep.
DKKHGGGj@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
Me as a native finnish speaker making every english speaker in a meeting unsure of my meanig
lemming@anarchist.nexus 12 hours ago
They absolutely do. Even within the same language, regional accents have different prosodies.
I recall reading a Nature article about how neonatal babies have different prosodies based on their parents spoken language that they pick up prenatally! How nuts is that!? Brains are cool.Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 12 hours ago
Wow. Off to searching for articles in Nature! Hello rabbit hole…
lol_idk@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Huh
ZiggyTheZygote@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
I just did a quick research on tonal languages, it’s quite tricky for a beginner to grasp these subtle expressions. Imagine a life without sarcasm. Brutal. I wonder if they have their own way of conveying it.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Oh, they do. Depending on the context, there’s a whole host of ways to imply sarcasm without depending on intonation. Body language, context, double entendre, formality shifts, etc.
lividweasel@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They just carry around a card that has “/s” written on it and flash it as necessary
lemming@anarchist.nexus 11 hours ago
Sarcasm can be conveyed non-verbally. Through facial expressions, gestures or situational incongruity for example. The core concept is not bound to specific languages, I’d say.
Vesiiiii@nord.pub 11 hours ago
true! and makes Sense.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Not true.
First hand knowledge, I’m Chinese American. My mom is from Taishan and I grew up in Guangzhou for the first 8 years before immigrating to the US. My mom uses scarcasm a lot. We speak Cantonese at home.
Example:
“我想去睇橋” (“I wanna go see the bridge”; a euphemism for I want to go to the nearest bridge and jump off to kms, and my mom knows the meaning of this btw)
Mom: “喂，使唔使載埋你去啊？” (“Hey, do you want us to drive you there?”; said in a very unusally happy and uplifting tone, as if she’d be glad to see me die (I mean… not really, I don’t think she really wants to see me die, I hope not, she’s just playing mindgames to “stop me from ‘attention seeking’”, she doesn’t understand what depression is.)
Or sometimes I get mad and refused to eat and mom was like: “哇，係唔係想練神仙啊？亦好呀，慳返啲食嘅。” (“Wow, are you trying to become an immortal being? That’s great, we can save some food”; again, with that weird “fake happy” voice.
And I instictively knew these were sarcasm.