Tone Spreading in African Languages
Ever wonder how a single word can have multiple meanings based only on its melody? This post explores "tone spreading", a fascinating process in many African languages where the pitch…
Tag: tonal language
Hmong’s Tonal Writing System
Discover the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), the ingenious writing system for the Hmong language. In this linguistic deep-dive, you'll learn how the final consonant of a word isn't pronounced, but…
The Alphabet of the Hills: The Fraser Script
Discover the Fraser alphabet, a remarkable script for the Lisu language where letters are ingeniously rotated to represent different sounds. Created by missionary James O. Fraser and his collaborators, this…
The Chameleon Tone: Unlocking the Musical Logic of Mandarin’s Tone Sandhi
Mandarin is famously a tonal language, but what many learners quickly discover is that the tones they memorize often change in mysterious ways during conversation. This isn't a mistake—it's a…
The Phonetics of Pop: Why Some Languages Are More “Singable” Than Others
Ever wonder why Italian opera sounds so smooth or why English dominates the pop charts? The answer lies in the "phonetics of pop"—the specific sounds, rhythms, and structures of a…
The Unspoken Melody: How Intonation Carries More Meaning Than Words
Beyond vocabulary lies prosody—the music of speech. From the rising inflection that turns a statement into a question to the sarcastic tone that flips meaning on its head, the unspoken…
What Makes Mandarin Chinese Difficult to Learn?
Learning a new language is always a rewarding yet challenging endeavor, and Mandarin Chinese is no exception. Touted as one of the most difficult languages...