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Date:         Fri, 4 Sep 1992 09:18:00 -0700
From:         "Bryce Carey, CNS,
              Admin. Sys. Group" <CAREY_B@CUBLDR.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Korean

From: carey_b@cubldr.colorado.edu

Annie says:

>Well, I sent email to a linguist friend of mine who knows
>about Korean, and asked him if it was a tonal language.  Here
>is his reply:

>> No, Korean is not a tonal language, because intonation (as well
>> as stress) is lexically irrelevant in Korean; there are no
>> minimal pairs of words that are distinguished only by intonational
>> pattern.  On the other hand, intonation does play a role in Korean
>> phonology and phonetics.
...stuff deleted...

>Of course, there do exist tonal languages and some deaf people do
>speechread them.  I suspect they just deal (not always easy, I'm sure)
>and figure out what the tones are by context, some facial and body
>expression, etc.  They just don't have access to the tones, just the
>way English speechreaders don't have access to the voiced/voiceless
>consonant distinction.  Of course, anyone who knows better, correct me
>if I'm wrong.  This is just my hunch.
>
>-Annie
>(annie@psyche.mit.edu)

Annie,

I think you are on the right track there. Seth Gordon gave us what
he claimed was an example from Chinese in which tones changed the
meaning of an expression from:

     'Mother called the horses'
to
     'Forty Four dead stone lions'

(I may not recall that exactly but that is close)

Speaking as a highly skilled visible speech-reader, I can assure
you that in ordinary contexts the first utterance makes sense and
the second does not. Therefore, a similarly skilled Chinese
visible speech-reader would most likely understand both possibilities
but would pay no attention to the second possibility (unless,
perhaps 'dead stone lion' is supposed to be understood idiomatically
as in English 'Stone dead lions').

In other words, context is everything. I am sure that hearing Chinese
people also rely on context.

Bosco gave us an example of English written without vowels. Reading
English without vowels is somewhat similar to visible speech-reading
where voiced/voiceless distinctions are not available and some
phonemes are invisible. It is not trivial, but certainly not overwhelmingly
difficult for people who understand the context and vocabulary being used.

I do not know Hebrew but I believe it is written without vowels, and
there is a pass-time of assigning number values to the consonants and
encoding words in such a way as to be able to communicate esoteric
secret messages using what appear to be ordinary Hebrew words. I have
absolutely no idea if this is a common thing. I believe it is
a sport also practiced in Arabic and Farsi.

My point is that the human brain/mind linguistic recognizer is a
marvelously devious piece of goods.  It appears to work by pattern
recognition, and pattern is interpreted from known contexts. I
strongly suspect that people make the mistake of thinking speech
understanding is an ear/nervous system function and overlook
the complexity of what they take for granted as their ability to
understand what people say to them.

Therefore, I would assume that it is perfectly possible to speech-read
tonal languages, although perhaps with difficulties unknown in
English. There may also be features of the tonal language that
are more readily understood in speechreading and that do not exist in
non-tonal languages.

-Bryce
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