IIRC, there are six major and three minor. In my opinion, they’re almost impossible to describe without sound. E.g. “Gau gau gau ge gau gau”, which means “nine old dogs’ plastic penises”.
Expat friends of mine who tried to learn the language in a structured manner got very frustrated and/or sounded like robots when speaking. Personally I gave up trying to understand the tones, and merely learned words by rote as though they were snippets of tunes. I ended up speaking far more fluently than my academic friends. Ten years on, I find I still know most of the vocab but my Canto friends tell me my tones have fallen all over the place.
I spoke to a guy from Pakistan. And he said that if he were to say this to a girl he hadn’t known for a long time, he would definitely use the formal version.
So, what’s the deal here. Does it work like that in all languages, or are there different standards?
Dumb question: what if a person in a tonal language culture is tone deaf? Is it the equivalent of mumbling in non-tonal languages? Is he hard to understand?
“Tone deaf” generally refers to not being able to tell say, a D from an E if you heard them both. You’d have to be really really tone deaf to have it interfere with understanding of tonal languages.
Just to point out, since we’re in Cafe Society, that “T’as d’beaux yeux, tu sais” (you have beautiful eyes, you know") is one of the most famous french movie quote (from “Quai des brumes”, if I’m not mistaken, and said by Jean Gabin) and, as a result, also kind of a joke as an uninspired pick-up line.
Being myself tone deaf (not completely, but just not being able to tell apart a D from a E, as **Saoirse ** said, would be a significant improvment for me), I sometimes wondered the same.
Fortunately, another tone-deaf poster asked in GQ once, and someone responded that actually, it wasn’t an issue, nor for native speaker, and nor even for people who, like him, learnt the language.
It might be important to note that, while danish and norwegian can sometimes be substituted by a non-speaker (since spoken flat, without tone or other flourishes, they come out about the same), it would not work in this case, since the word for “beautiful” is different.
Faroese: “Tú hevur vøkur eygu” (somewhat over-correct, written-language), or “Tú hevur pen eygir” (a teacher would mark this as an error, but it is more likely to be heard spoken that way. The word “eygir” does not really exist in written form, I shaped it just now. Likewise, the word “pen” is a loan from danish, and not really allowed as a written word.)
BTW, If you ever need the faroese one, please tell me. To me knowledge, there are something like 70.000 faroese-speakers in the world, including non-natives. I’d like to hear just how small the world is.
allow me to suggest “que bonitos ojos tienes” for spanish. It stands for “what beautiful eyes you have” so it is not as literal but it is a more natural thing to say (and more likely to be taken as a compliment rather than a doctor’s diagnosis)
I’m affraid it is off. Though strictly speaking the grammar is correct, the construction you used isn’t the right one for this situation. I’d say:
Kimi wa kirei na me wo shite iru ne.
There’s another word for eye you could also use:
Kimi wa kirei na hitomi wo shite iru ne.
You can replace “kimi” (you - familiar, man-to-woman) with the person’s name. You can also replace “kirei na” (beautiful/pretty) with the slightly more elated “utsukushii”.
Sapo, that has the right Spanish feel the way you said it.
This is how the Turkic languages express the concept of “have”: Literally, “Your beautiful eyes exist.” The way to say “X has Y” is X-in Y-i var, ‘the Y of X exists’. And “X does not have Y” is X-in Y-i yok, ‘the Y of X is nonexistent’. I mentioned this because it’s such a radically different construction for expressing possession than in English.
Bertrand Russell was thinking along these lines with his sample sentence used in linguistic analysis: “The king of France is bald.” Its truth value cannot be determined because in fact the king of France is nonexistent.
Mongolian has a very neat way of putting it: Literally Mongols say “You are someone-to-whom-beautiful-eyes-are-attributed,” but that’s a very cumbersome way of expressing the elegant little suffix -tei which is so useful in Mongolian grammar for attributives.
Spanish from Spain:
tienes unos ojos preciosos (“hermosos” sounds too dictionary-ish, preciosos is more emphatic than bonitos, lindos is more common in latin america)
Or you could dedicate her La Malagueña:
… qué bonitos ojos tienes
debajo de esas dos cejas,
debajo de esas dos cejas,
qué bonitos ojos tienes,
malagueña salerosa.
that’s very romantic: “we have detected the presence of above-average aesthetic pleasantry in your light sensory organs”
as a minor hijack, there was this Sci-Fi short story where one alien notices that humans compliment each other by making analogies on the color of the facial features, so he approaches a human female and says “I love your buttery teeth”. :smack:
Maybe it would be nice to hear from the people offering these translations whether they are valid compliments/pickups to be used with a non-familiar lady.
