longer but easier to understand, I hope
I just realized that what I wrote above may be very confusing even for those who are fluent in English but have no linguistics background, so I'm going to try to explain it by example in a language you are intimately familiar with --
ENGLISH! -- and that should help anybody who reads this thread in the future.
In English, (over-simplified argument but bear with me) we have three tones or morae instead of the two the Japanese have. If Japanese is a lo-hi mora system, then English is a lo-middle-hi system. We will denote this by writing L for lo, M for middle, and H for high. Some examples:
- "apple" has a hi-lo, or HL, pattern
- "watermelon" is HLLL
- "Madagascar" is MMHL (not LLHL -- you can prove this to yourself by giving the -car the same tone you gave the Ma- and the -da- syllables, which would be an MMHM pattern.)
Got it? Okay. Here's what I want you to do now: tell me how you'd say these words?
- experiment
- experimentation
The word "experiment" is LHLL but the word "experimentation" is LMMMHL. Notice that you go up from ex- to -per- but you go up another level from -men- to -ta-, and then you drop two whole tonal levels back down when you finish it all up with the -tion. You should (if you speak American English; and I don't think other Englishes will differ much for these two words.) (If you notice that "experimentation" has more than 3 tones or that either word appears to have something like a
half-tone, good for you! Just remember, I said English isn't really a 3-tone language, we're just applying the model as best we can for now to avoid needless complications. ^^; )
So what's the point of all this?
These tones, these L's and H's, are what I'm talking about in Japanese when I use the word "mora" (singular) or "morae" (plural). So here's what I want you to try out now:
- try saying "experiment" with only one tone -- let's pick a lo-tone like a robot, which would be LLLL.
- try saying "experimentation" with this tonal pattern: HHLLLL (This should sound very funny to you! If it doesn't ...
)
If somebody said the words like this to you on the street, and said all of their words with similarly funny tones, would you believe they could speak native English? No, of course not. You would either think they were fooling around, psycho, or a foreigner.
SAME THING FOR ALL LANGUAGES WITH TONES.
If a Japanese guy heard me say 宝物 with the following tone pattern -- LHLHL -- first of all it'd probably make him think of the game Simon™
(you know, the music game with 4 colored light pads?), but second of all he'd know I wasn't a native speaker. Nobody in Japan says 宝物 like that. Nobody. It's not an acceptable intonation in normal speech. And if you said all your words just as badly? It'd be borderline unintelligible.
For Americans, think about Apu from the Simpsons. This stereotype about Indian English holds just as true for American Japanese or for any 2ary language speaker.
When we say that foreigners are talking incorrectly, most of the time it's the tone! Even the newbs pronounce the syllablic sounds correctly!
Why did I choose the words "experiment" and "experimentation"? Why not just show you one word? Because:
I want you to recognize that it's human nature for second-language acquirers to assume tonal inheritance for word families. In plain English? People assume that the "e x p e r i m e n t" portion of the words "experiment," "experimentation," "experimented," "experimental," etc. should be identical. So they learn how to say "experiment" correctly (tones and all) but then they misapply "experiment"'s tones to the words "experimentation" and wind up sounding like a foreigner. Which is exactly what they are, of course. ^_^;
So the moral of the story is,
if all your Japanese comes from textbooks, YOU'RE SCREWED. Because you'll zero appreciation for spoken tones, and
NO textbook includes mora diacritical marks over words. (I mean no textbook outside of advanced/expert linguistics texts.) And if all your Japanese comes from music?
YOU'RE STILL SCREWED. Not too screwed. And not at all for a beginner's level. But screwed enough and screwed too much if you're going for mastery of the language. If mastery's the goal, then you won't want to fuck around. Learn how to say the words correctly right from the beginning. Because once you get them into your heard incorrectly, it's a
haaaaard habit to break.
P.S. Did you check out that Simon link? I'll say this then: think of the blue color as L, the red color as M, and the green color as H. (Ignore the Yellow, which is a musical flat.)
