My understanding is that in the Chinese language, vocal inflection - a deliberate fluctuation of the fundamental frequency being emitted by the vocal cords - carries information.
When one whispers, there is no clearly-defined fundamental frequency: the vocal cords are essentially putting out broad-spectrum noise.
So…is it possible to whisper in Chinese and be understood by the listener? Inthe absence of vocal inflection, is there some other way for the missing information to be conveyed?
Well, you can have enough of an inflection to determine whether something is a question in english IME, which I understand is about the same level of inflection that Chinese uses, just in every word to distinguish morphemes rather than at the end of a word to mark the sentence as a question. So if both of those assumptions of mine are true, then yes, you can whisper in Chinese.
We had a thread a while back in which someone asked how people can understand sung Chinese, because presumably words are sung to the tune, without the normal tones. The general answer was that you understand it from context. I’d assume the same thing would be true of whispering.
In Chinese the inflections are relative to the words next to them. They are not absolute. So, whispering is not a problem.
When my office mate talks to her husband on the phone, it is extremely sotto voce and nearly monotone. And in Mandarin. I imagine that she communicates just fine with him.
To me, the inflections in Mandarin are roughly approximate to the inflections you’d use in these phrases:
If you can whisper these, you can whisper in Mandarin.
absolutely. it’s not so much tone as emphasis.
That’s exactly my point: you can’t whisper these. You can speak them very quietly (just as you can sing them sotto voce), but you can’t whisper them.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I can certainly whisper those things without needing to engage the ol’ vocal cords.
You can articulate the words with your lips and tongue, yes, but when you are truly whispering, it’s not possible to vary the pitch - because your vocal cords are not emitting a fundamental pitch.
I think there may be some confusion in this thread regarding exactly is meant by the term “whispering:”
In English, some consonants are voiced, some are not. Since whispers are all unvoiced, how is it that we are able to whisper in English and be understood?
Edit: I see that Joe has pre-answered my question.
Yes, you *can *whisper them - or at least, people can; I can’t speak for you personally. We change the pitch of our speech and singing not just by vibrating our vocal folds faster or slower, but also by changing the shape of the space inside our mouths and throats. When we make a low note, we make that space bigger. When we make a high note, we make it smaller. And you’ll hear these changes in the frequency of the sound you’re making, whether that sound is a sustained vibration or turbulence.
If I whisper “Eh” with my tongue pressed close to the roof of my mouth, the air passing through is constricted and comes out with more of a hiss. If I drop my tongue as low as I can, I get a puffier sound. I can also adjust my vocal folds to create more friction, to add a low rumble to the first half of “Really?”. And I can force a quick burst of air when saying “Huh!”, making a louder, higher-pitched sound that drops off quickly.
Try whispering, “Really?” “Yes! Really!” Even if you don’t vocalize at all, you can still make intelligible differences in the sound.
You can also change the volume of a whisper and use changes in volume as a substitute for a proper change in pitch. Rising volume = rising pitch for me without even thinking about it. So all four of the examples are quite easy to do while whispering and without losing much of the information quality.
People are always whispering in W.H. vam Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries. Van Gulik spoke fluent Chinese, so I assume he knew whereof he wrote.
There is also a lot of noise coming off of the air hitting your teeth and other mouth surfaces, such as the “sh” sound or a “t” sound. Pitch changes are easily made, just like with whistling, by changing the acoustics of your mouth. It’s easy enough to change the pitch of a “shh” noise, and there is no vocal cord action going on.
I never thought about the issue before, but I just tried whispering to myself at higher and lower pitches, and with going up at the end of a phrase, or down. It was not at all difficult to do. Changing tones a s quickly and reliably as a Chinese speaker would need to do might be a bit harder, but then, not having ever practiced this, I would not be able to do it while speaking out loud either.
I turned around and asked a Chinese colleague, and she told me that of course it’s possible. You don’t need to enunciate the tonal vowels very distinctly if it’s your native language, and native speakers can understand each other just fine while whispering.
I guess when you don’t speak a language, you can imagine all sorts of stuff that is nonsensical to a speaker of that language. I’d be willing to bet that just about any language can be spoken, whispered, sung or shouted. Even that clicking stuff the Bushmen of the Kalahari do can probably handle all of these ranges even though that’s kind of hard for me to imagine.
Whispered Chinese can be understood as well as say whispered English. Some Chinese can even lip read, but that possibly has a lower comprehension level than the english equivalent owing to the tonal nature.
I don’t have direct experience, but I can easily imagine louder or softer clicks. Clicks don’t engage the vocal folds though, so perhaps it would be incorrect to call the quiet ones a “whisper”. Still, no language is composed entirely of clicks, they are just a part of the whole vocal repertoire. As to sung clicks, I imagine it would be somewhat similar to voiceless consonants in that you can’t really sustain a note on them, but they can be worked into singing like percussion.