I think this sounds like something that can be tested empirically relatively easily given the right resources and a desire to get a paper published. Let’s say we just take a long pinyin text and have a foreigner read it out phonetically. Or, to get more fancy, let’s say we take a voice recording of real Mandarin, like from radio, and edit it to replace the vowel sounds with their non-tonal equivalents based on Spanish pronunciation.
So, would people fluent in the language be able to decipher it, either up front or maybe with some practice? Let’s say they could try using context for word identification or maybe they could ask clarification questions in the particularly ambiguous and inscrutable cases. But would this overall work? Did anybody ever try? Are there known cases of people who can speak tonal languages but who are known to have a hearing defect that prevents tone disambiguation?
My Mother occasionally tutors Mandarin for adult students. One day, a new student who approached her after class after all the students had left.
This middle aged man had been studying mandarin from a book on his own time for over two years. He’s able to read very well but has no idea of the tones of the vowels or how to pronounce any of the words, especially the nonenglish sounds like zh, x, q etc…
He approached her and said “Self study is very slow”
With different tones, what he actually said was “Sleeping alone is very dull.”
Needless to say, she was somewhat startled.
EDIT: In practice you can sometimes get some meaning from context clues, for example sont lyrics have to follow the song and are usually atonal.
I speak Mandarin pretty poorly, and quite often my tones are off.
If I seriously don’t hit the tones on something, people understand it about half the time (doesn’t help that where I live, some of the tones are switched due to local dialect.) But when I say stuff with the tones off- even when I am saying the name of a Chinese city in English- people WILL correct me.
So in context, it might work a little bit. But a random bit of text probably would not.
I’m a native Cantonese speaker, which is even more tonal than Mandarin (six tones instead of four). Provided that you are speaking in complete sentences, and you are in fact pronouncing all the vowels and consonants more or less correctly, I’d say it is still fairly comprehensible even if you are speaking in a completely flat, robotic voice. In fact, this is more or less what people do when they want to do a stereotypical mock foreigner accent, and the result is mostly understandable.
I think it would depend partly on the subject matter and the length of dialogue, and also the choice of words. If it had a lot of homonyms, it would be pretty hard to figure out.
For example, “Is Mother scolding a horse?” could be rendered as:
ma1 ma1 ma4 ma3 ma?
Take out tones entirely, or use the wrong ones, and those five “ma” sounds in a row could be heard as “Is the horse scolding Mother?” “[A] mother is scolding [another] mother,” “A horse scolds another horse, who scolds yet another horse,” “Is the horse’s mother [in the act of] scolding?” and so on.
More examples come to mind . . . the English teacher who was bewildered because he was trying to tell his students about his great grandmother . . . he didn’t know the word in Chinese (nor do I, for that matter) but got tried to get around it by saying “My grandmother’s grandmother.” The students laughed uproariously when what came out of his mouth sounded like “My grandmother’s tits.”
That’s not really related to tones, though, right? It seems to me to be the same word with different meanings. He probably said 我奶奶的奶奶. For the non-Chinese speakers, 奶 means milk. 奶奶 means grandmother. I don’t know Mandarin well enough to tell if it is normally used to mean tits as well, but I can definitely see that happening.
Context is everything. If at least some of the words are correct, then a person might be able to guess the overall meaning of the sentence, with some mistakes.
Most people don’t tell you this but the spoken flow of words sometimes intentionally distort the tone of the written word.
To all those people claiming a toneless recitation would be completely incomprehensible: how do you expect Mandarin speakers can understand singing, then? It seems to me that dropping the tones would cause ambiguity, not incomprehensibility, and that this ambiguity can be resolved to some extent through context. Consider what happens in English when we whisper: all our voiced consonants become unvoiced (e.g., /z/ becomes /s/, /v/ becomes /f/, /d/ becomes /t/, etc.) and yet we are usually understood.
That’s because we pronounce those sounds differently while whispering, particularly when we perceive the meaning might be unclear. Record yourself sometime with words and phrases that may be ambiguous. I find I over-aspirate the unvoiced consonants. For example, while /d/ becomes /t/, /t/ becomes /t[sup]h[/sup]/.
Also, I know that, in French music at least, the rise and fall of tone is often indicated in the music (even though it is unessential to understanding.) So the music itself may help with distinguishing the tones. Or maybe songwriters just avoid truly ambiguous statements, ones that can’t even be figured out by context.
Cite? I call BS on this one. Show me the characters for both sentences and I’ll show you they don’t sound the same.
Like whoeve above that confused ‘laoshi’ and ‘laoshu’.
Yes, saying one word or even a phrase with no tones or context and it would be tough to impossible. But oral chinese eons ago did this thing called di- syllabicize. Eg, use two syllables when one would do. For example, you say ‘go out’/chu1qu4 instead of ‘go’/qu4.
tones are important but just part of the puzzle. Context is much more important. I butcher a lot of tones but am rarely misunderstood. and it’s really obvious when people don’t understand because my tone is too off.
Sheesh, we use tiones in American every day. ‘Really?’ as a question would be like the mandarin rising 2nd tone. ‘Really!’ as an emphatic affirmative would be like a chinese 4th tone.
ISTM that Chinese languages use a lot fewer phonemes and have a lot more “homophones” (distinguished by tones) than English, so this isn’t the best argument. (I could be wrong, though–my studies were in Japanese, not any Chinese language.)
