Tone (linguistics) | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-17

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Tone (linguistics)


00:02:43 1 List of tonal languages
00:02:53 1.1 Africa
00:03:32 1.2 Asia
00:04:51 1.3 Europe
00:05:14 1.4 Australasia
00:05:36 1.5 America
00:06:26 1.6 Summary
00:10:43 2 Mechanics
00:13:47 3 Tone and intonation
00:14:50 4 spanRegister tones and contour tones
00:16:26 4.1 Register phonation
00:17:18 5 Tone terracing and tone sandhi
00:17:28 5.1 Tone terracing
00:18:55 5.2 Tone sandhi
00:19:44 6 Word tones and syllable tones
00:21:50 7 Tonal polarity
00:22:35 8 Uses of tone
00:25:46 9 Phonetic notation
00:28:13 9.1 Africa
00:29:09 9.2 Asia
00:34:05 9.3 North America
00:35:33 9.4 South America
00:36:02 9.5 Europe
00:36:52 10 Orthographies
00:37:05 11 Number of tones
00:37:43 12 Origin
00:38:52 13 See also
00:40:21 14 References
00:46:17 15 Bibliography



Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.

Learning by listening is a great way to:
- increases imagination and understanding
- improves your listening skills
- improves your own spoken accent
- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain

Now learn the vast amount of general knowledge available on Wikipedia through audio (audio article). You could even learn subconsciously by playing the audio while you are sleeping! If you are planning to listen a lot, you could try using a bone conduction headphone, or a standard speaker instead of an earphone.

You can find other Wikipedia audio articles too at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuKfABj2eGyjH3ntPxp4YeQ

You can upload your own Wikipedia articles through:
https://github.com/nodef/wikipedia-tts



"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
- Socrates



SUMMARY
=======
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words.  All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas; as many as seventy percent of world languages may be tonal.In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other, known as a register tone system.  In multisyllable words, a single tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.
In the most widely spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, tones are distinguished by their distinctive shape, known as contour, with each tone having a different internal pattern of rising and falling pitch. Many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone. Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance (such as changing a verb to a noun or vice versa).
Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Kra–Dai, Vietic and Sino-Tibetan languages. The Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems.  Some languages combine both systems, such as Cantonese, which produces three varieties of contour tone at three different pitch levels, and the Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench, which employs five level tones and one or two rising tones across levels.Many languages use tone in a more limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows.  Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent and whether a coherent definition is even possible.