I recently acquired a used book entitled Patterns of Spanish Pronunciation: A Drillbook, by J. Donald Bowen and Robert P. Stockwell (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960). Because I am also studying Chinese, the following excerpt (id., p. 8) caught my eye: Thě Whíte Hoùse (i.e., the President's residence) Thě whîte hoúse (i.e., a house painted white) Thě Whíte hoûse (i.e., the house owned by Mr. White) I misinterpreted the diacritic marks as tone marks, but they are actually stress indicators (which I learned tonight). Still, it fascinated me that, somewhat like Chinese, we do pronounce the exact same words with different tones depending on our meanings.
No no. In Chinese, those are different words, not the exact same words. They happen to have the same vowels and consonants, but the tones are phonemic. In Chinese, you1, you2, you3, and you4 are four different words with four different meanings. (Actually there are an average of three homonyms for each syllable in vernacular speech, so these are really twelve different words with twelve different meanings, but that's a different topic. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) In English, tone is not phonemic. All those various tonal inflections of the word "you" do not change it from being the second person pronoun into some other word. They just help us express our feelings. Chinese speakers are very restricted in their ability to express feelings by tone, so they have to be better able to express them verbally. (Yes tone comes out of our mouths but for anglophones it's not part of our language, the way it is for Chinese speakers.)
The existence of different stresses in the examples of "white house" (phonetic) reflect different meanings, not just different emotions, but Fragglerocker is certainly correct that Chinese goes much farther in having entirely different words from words with the same consonants and vowels but with different tones. I recently read that the ancient Indo-European roots of modern western languages had some tone changes to reflect different meanings, but that only a handful of modern western languages still have such tone changes, but none to the extent of Chinese. Apparently, the ancient roots of western languages and Chinese have the same "Indo-" roots, but split off at some point. I don't have it in front of me, but Chinese apparently came from the Indo-Tibetan line of languages. I did a quick google search while I was writing this and found an interesting link that discusses the possible connection between Chinese and Indo-European languages: http://www.sino-platonic.org/abstracts/spp007_indo_european_chinese.html I make no claim that Chinese and English are terribly similar, but it would be interesting if they actually are related.
The above link is a dead end because the article cannot actually be found in full through its source link. And, the reason that I could not find "Indo-Tibetan" in a google search is because the correct term is "Sino-Tibetan." An interesting free PDF that I did find refers to the oldest known Sanskrit word in Chinese: http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp201_sanskrit_word_chinese.pdf However, it is plain from the article that this word would have come into Chinese through a cultural exchange, not a common language relation. This is fun stuff, but too far beyond me.
But the White House is still a white house. The stress means that it's a particular white house. In any case, proper names circumvent the normal evolution of words. It's not clear how the city of Casablanca got its name, but probably because there are a lot of white houses in tropical latitudes. Sometimes names are co-opted as words, so we get a "mulligan" as a scorekeeping technique in golf, which is now expanding beyond the terminology of games. "This dinner came out just terrible. Let's take a mulligan and go to a restaurant." This is hardly a surprise, since it has entirely different words that have the same vowels, consonants and tones. There are only 1600 distinct monosyllables in Mandarin phonetics, yet my "basic" Fenn dictionary has 5,000 entries. That's an average of three han zi for each syllable. That's a controversial hypothesis. Tonality is ephemeral. Languages acquire it and lose it. One scholar insists that Ancient Chinese was not tonal at all, and that the tonality arose about 2,000 years ago. Tonality, while not exactly common, is widespread. Many Native American languages use it, as do some African languages. I see that you found the error in that name. But still, anthropologists as well as linguists wonder whether all languages are related. See the Nostratic hypothesis, which attempts to link most of the non-African languages. Some technologies spread very rapidly. For example, the dog was the first domesticated animal, but the domestication occurred exactly once. Domesticated dogs were traded to other tribes before they thought of the idea themselves. All dogs are descended from a dozen or so ancestors in Mesopotamia at the dawn of the Neolithic Era. So we're all wondering whether language was one of those technologies. When people observed the members of a nearby tribe communicating with vocal sounds, increasing their ability to plan, cooperate and share knowledge across generations, did they borrow their language? Or was the technology invented in multiple times and places? Since languages change enormously over the centuries, to the point that they become literally unrecognizable, it will be a real challenge to start with the thousands of languages we still have and develop the algorithms to trace them back to a common ancestor. Someone actually claimed to have done that about fifteen years ago, finding cognates for about fifty words in several of the world's important but (so far) unrelated languages, using massively parallel computing to find the phonetic shifts that made the tracing possible. Unfortunately subsequent research ruled that their results were not numerous enough to rule out coincidence. I presume you know that just a couple of years ago the astounding discovery was made that the Na-Dene family of languages in North America is related to the Yeniseian language of Siberia. Since these people had no contact for about 15,000 years, this makes what we now call Dene-Yeniseian the oldest known language family, by a factor of two or three.
I did not know. It's amazing that both languages stayed isolated enough to retain enough evidence to last 15,000 years. A book written entirely in slang English would be gibberrish within a lifetime.
The ancestral Na-Dene tongue developed into an entire language family, so there was no isolation. The 35-40 geographically widespread Athabaskan languages include Navajo (the most well-established in the group with 170,000 speakers, many of whom speak it as their primary language although their schools also teach English), Chilcotin and Hupa. Na-Dene also includes the endangered Tlingit language (around 200 speakers) and Eyak, whose last native speaker died in this century. We know very little about the evolution of the Yeniseian group since its only living members are Ken (a few hundred speakers) and possibly Yugh (2-3 non-fluent speakers 20 years ago). A few other members were identified over the past few centuries but they were not recorded for study. The evidence for the relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseian is based on about 100 cognates and ten inflections. The relationship is not completely accepted by the world community of linguists. Every time I read about it, its status has changed since the last time. It's possible that it will be disproved, or perhaps never promoted beyond the status of a promising hypothesis.
