Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. This means that, unlike English, the meanings of Chinese words depend not only on the phonemes that make up words, but also the pitch and contour used when words are pronounced.
It is sometimes said that pronouncing Chinese tones is so difficult that it is easy to mistakenly use an incorrect tone and inadvertently say a word with almost identical pronunciation, but with a different tone, and thus a different meaning.
For example, if the Chinese words for "happy" and "sick" had the same pronunciation (which they do not), but used different tones, one might mean to say, "You make me happy," but unwittingly remark, "You make me sick."
Does the nature of Chinese tones actually allow for these bloopers? Do speakers of Chinese as a second language need to stay on constant guard to avoid blurting out spoonerisms? To answer these questions, the nature of the Chinese language needs to be explored.
How Tones Work
While different Chinese dialects have different amounts of tones, Mandarin has a comparatively small number: 4. More correctly, Mandarin uses 4 tones and 1 neutral tone. A neutral tone is when syllables are pronounced relatively quickly and with no obvious contour or pitch.
The four tones can be described as follows:
- The first tone is a high, level tone
- The second tone is a rising tone
- The third tone is a dipping, then rising tone
- The fourth tone is a falling tone
Chinese Syllables, Words, and Characters
There are approximately 10,000 commonly used Chinese characters. The pronunciation of a Chinese character is never longer than 1 syllable. But there are approximately only 400 meaningful monosyllables used in Chinese. Since there are 10,000 characters but only 400-odd monosyllables, many characters are homophonous.
This is where tones come in handy, as they offer a way to better differentiate between words that are otherwise pronounced identically. To illustrate, the syllable "di" corresponds to around 25 commonly used characters. 4 of these characters are pronounced using a first tone, 8 with a second tone, 5 with a third tone, and 8 with a fourth tone.
While the number of characters with the same pronunciation and tone can be quite high, it should be kept in mind that the vast majority of commonly used Chinese words are disyllabic, or polysyllabic. That is, Chinese words of often made up of two or more characters. This feature of Chinese helps to further differentiate between words, as the chance of disyllabic words sharing the exact pronunciation is comparatively rare.
What are the Chances of Speaking Meaningful Mistakes?
Although many Chinese characters are homophonous, tones help to differentiate words. The fact that most words are disyllabic also helps make Chinese a less ambiguous spoken language. This lessens the chance of mispronouncing a tone and accidentally changing the meaning of one's sentence.
Another thing to remember is that words are used in contexts, and not usually in complete isolation. Even if a speaker were to mispronounce a tone, the chances of the intended spoken word fitting into a sentence in a grammatically or contextually sound way is not something that can often happen.
In most cases when incorrect tones are used, native Chinese speakers can either guess the speaker's intended meaning, or will otherwise fail to understand what the speaker is trying to say. As an example, if someone were to speak English and say, "I feel so jat today," native English speakers would either not understand the intended meaning, or would guess that "fat" was the word the speaker intended to use.
In English, when a consonant or vowel is accidentally swapped for another, the chances of this being a meaningful and contextually sound mistake is not high. Likewise, depending on the context of the sentence and situation, using tone incorrectly in Chinese will usually result in an incomprehensible sentence more often than it will result in a meaningful sentence with an unintended or inopportune meaning.
However, that is not to say that using tone incorrectly can never lead to comprehensible mistakes. In the right context, a mistake could even result in an embarrassing or rude sentence, which could in turn lead to an uncomfortable situation.
Examples of Possible (Perhaps Far-Fetched) Mistakes
For the sake of fun, here are some English translations of Chinese sentence in which the incorrect pronunciation of tone could completely change the intended meaning of a sentence in a grammatically sound way. The Chinese pronunciations of the keywords are given, and the numbers indicate tone.
- Intended meaning: Thankfully, I have no symptoms (of a disease).
- Wrong tone meaning: Thankfully, I have no refrigerator.
- Symptom (of a disease): bing4xiang3; Refrigerator: bing1xiang1
- Intended meaning: You keep covering your ears, do you have an ear-ache?
- Wrong tone meaning: You keep covering your ears, do you have a child?
- Ear-ache: er3tong4; Child: er2tong2
Yet, just as in English, mispronunciation can sometimes lead to meaningful and even comical mistakes. These situations are rare, and should therefore be celebrated whenever they occur.
Sources
DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1984.
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