A Comparison of Punjabi and Mandarin Tones

By Amrit Bidegaray

Seminar in Applied Linguistics
Research paper

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Introduction

        Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone). All languages use tone to express emphasis, emotion, or to contrast. But not all languages use tone to distinguish lexical meaning. The way tone is used in a language determines if it is a tonal language or a pitch accent language. A slight majority of the world’s languages are tonal. Both Punjabi and Mandarin are tonal languages. This paper will compare and contrast the origin, type and complexity of the tones in the Punjabi and Mandarin languages.

Origin of Tones

        Tonogenesis is an interesting aspect of linguistics. Tone is an areal rather than a genetic feature.  “A language can acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language switch to the language in question” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone). This means that tones are acquired through association. Tones can also arise spontaneously and surprisingly quickly (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone).

        In the Chinese languages, the tones arose as a reinterpretation of initial and final consonant sounds. In Middle Chinese (500 BC to 200 AD) there were three tones. These arose from the final consonants of Old Chinese (/s/ or /?/). Later, dialects split the tones into two depending on if the final consonant was voiced or voiceless. The vowels following an unvoiced consonant acquired a high tone and those following a voiced consonant acquired a low tone. In the Punjabi language, the tones also arose as a reinterpretation of different consonants in terms of pitch.

Tones: General Information

        There are two main categories of tones: the contour tone system and the register tone system. Both Mandarin and Punjabi have a contour tone system in which the tones shift in pitch (meaning that the pitch rises, falls, dips or peaks). In the register tone system, the tones are level, which means that they have relatively steady pitches. They only differ in whether the tones are high or low. The register tone system is found in the languages of West Africa.

        Another distinction is whether or not the tone applies to each syllable or to a word as a whole. In some languages, like Cantonese and Thai, each syllable can carry a tone. In Bantu languages, each word carries a tone. “A trisyllabic word in a syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities than a monosyllabic word, but there is no such difference in a word-tone system” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone).

        An intermediate position, known as tone sandhi, also exists. Tone sandhi is the change of tone that occurs in some languages when different tones come together in a word or phrase. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining.” For example, Mandarin Chinese has a sandhi rule where a low-tone becomes a rising tone when it is followed by another low tone (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone). Therefore, one tone affects another.  

        The following part of this paper will compare two contour tone languages: Punjabi and Mandarin. A brief overview and history will be presented for each language as well as a detailed description of the tones.

Main Characteristics of Punjabi

        Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Northern region of India and Pakistan (see map 1, p. 11). It is known as the language of the land of Punjab, the prominent language of the Sikhs, the most common language spoken in Pakistan, and the 11^th most spoken language in the world with 104 million speakers. A unique feature of Punjabi is that it is the only Indo-European language that has tonal contrasts. It is an agglutinative language in morphological complexity and is a Subject – Object – Verb language with a fairly fixed word order (Bhatia 1993: xxv). There are two main scripts: Gurmuhki in India and Shahmuhki in Pakistan. But there are also several other writing scripts depending on the region and dialect spoken as well as the religion of the speaker (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi). There are no special symbols for tones in the Gurmuhki script, so the correspondence between characters and pronunciation is irregular (Bhatia 1993: xxv).

Brief History of Punjabi

        Punjabi, as an independent language, has gone through three stages: Old Punjabi in the 10^th – 16^th century, Medieval Punjabi from the 16^th -19^th century, and Modern Punjabi from the 19^th century to present (Bhatia 1993: xviii). Punjab has a long history and rich cultural heritage. After the death of the Maharaja of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, the region came under British Rule and was made a province of British India in 1849. The province was again divided between Pakistan and India during the independence in 1947.       The history of the Punjab is wrought with suffering and sacrifice. The partition destroyed thousands of lives with riots and massacres. The exodus from the newly formed state in Pakistan forced Hindu, Sikh and Muslim Punjabi’s to flee their homes and settle in different districts and even different countries. Punjab has been a very unstable region socially and culturally as well as geographically (www.punjabi.com).

        The boundary of Indian Punjab today has changed several times over the last few centuries and currently occupies less than 15% of the pre-partition colonial Punjab.

A large number of Punjabi’s live outside the state and many have settled in Delhi, other towns of North India, England, Canada and the United States (www.punjabi.com).

        Dating back 6000 years, Punjab has been the seat of Indian culture. Traditional literature such as Ramayana and the Vedas go back to Punjab. At the end of the 16^th century, during the Middle period of the Punjabi language, Punjabi literature was well documented with Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims producing rich poems (www.indiasite.com).

        The linguistic situation of the Punjabi language is complex. When the Punjab state split, 10 million people were uprooted from India and Pakistan. The Punjabi population underwent a radical reorganization which had an important impact on the language. Many dialects emerged and today there is still disagreement over which is the standard dialect. In addition, there are also national, regional and social varieties and multiple dialects have become the rule rather than the exception.

Main Characteristics of Mandarin

        Mandarin belongs to an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is the most widely spoken of all the Chinese languages/dialects. It is spoken in Northern and Southwestern China (see map 2, p. 11) and has 885 million native speakers (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin). Mandarin is an isolating language where the word order determines the grammatical relations. Mandarin is written in traditional Chinese characters which were developed over 4000 years ago. Like Punjabi, there is little connection between the written and spoken language. Because the writing system uses logographs, speakers of all Chinese languages/dialects can understand the writing system.

Brief History of Mandarin

        Mandarin (termed “Putonghua”) is the official language of the People’s Republic of China. It is also the official language of Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. The term Mandarin comes from a Beijing expression which means “officals’ language” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin).

        There are three periods in Chinese history: Preclassical from 1500 to 500 BC, Classical from 500 BC to 200 AD, and Postclassical from 200 AD to present. The first example of language from the Preclassical period consist of inscriptions on bone and bronze (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin). The writings of Confucius and examples of prose are from the Classical period. The language of the Postclassical period (which is modeled upon that of the Classical period) was used by administrators, scholars, etc. At the beginning on the twentieth century there was a reform movement which sought to create a form of Mandarin that could be understood by the masses. This reform consisted of simplifying the traditional characters and forming a phonetic alphabet (Pinyin) with the goal of eliminating illiteracy.  This Modern Standard Chinese was adopted in 1956 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin).

A Description and Comparison of Punjabi and Mandarin Tones

Punjabi Tones

        Punjabi has three tones: high, mid and low. The high tone is higher than the other two tones and the syllable with this tone is shorter than with the other two tones. It is marked by [/] above the vowel.  In the high tone the pitch of the voice rises above its normal level and then falls on the following syllable as in the word “Ghōṛā” which means horse. The mid tone (also called the level tone) is an intermediate pitch between the high and low tone and is not marked by any letters or symbols in the Gurmukhi script. An example of this is the word for whip “kōṛā.” In the low tone, the voice is lowered below the normal pitch and then is raised during the following syllable as in “kōhṛā” which means “leper.” It is marked with [\] above the vowel (www.punjabilok.com). The following table demonstrates three examples of the Punjabi tones.

Table 1. Punjabi Tones

(http:www.advancedcentrepunjabi.org)

Mandarin Tones

        The Mandarin tonal system is much more complex than that of Punjabi.

Mandarin has 4 basic tones (high level, high rising, dipping/falling, and high falling). The high level tone is marked with a straight horizontal line [–] over the vowel. The high rising tone is a rising tone from the mid-low area of your natural voice to the high area. It is marked with a [/] over the vowel. The third tone is a dipping tone that starts mid-low, moves to bottom of voice and then rises to the middle. It is marked by a [ˇ]. The fourth tone is a falling tone which starts high and then falls throughout your voice range. It is marked by [\]. There is also a neutral tone which is not numbered. The neutral tone depends on the tone that precedes it (www.uiowa.edu). The following table shows the Mandarin tones. 

Table 2. Mandarin Tones

(http:www.oiowa.edu)

        In the Mandarin tonal system, each stressed syllable has a contrastive pitch. Mandarin also has a polysyllabic word structure (www.lmp.ucla.edu).  Therefore a disyllabic word can have 16 tones. At the same time, many Mandarin suffixes and particles have a neutral tone.  The neutral tone depends on the tone that precedes it. It tends to move toward the center of the natural voice range at the end of the previous tone. It also looses its original tone because it is not stressed. The following table demonstrates the tonal pattern when a neutral tone is added.

   Table 3.  Neutral tones in Mandarin

“With tones 1 and 2 (high level and high rising), the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid register tone — the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, with tone 4 (falling) it has a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable drops to match where the contour leaves off. And with tone 3 (low-dipping), the contour spreads to the second syllable: That is, the contour is the same (˨˩˦) whether the word has one syllable or two. This is similar to the situation in word-tone languages (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tones).”

        Mandarin also has situations where the basic tone is modified which are known as tone sandhi. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to another syllable, the pitch of the resulting word is determined in part by the first syllable. There are three main tone sandhi rules:

        1. If a third tone is followed by another third tone, it changes to a tone similar to     the second tone. For example: hěn + hǎo = hěnhǎo 'very good'

        2. If a third tone is followed by a neutral tone, first tone, second tone or fourth         tone, it changes to a 'half-third.' It begins to dip, but never rises. For example:          hǎo + de = hǎode 'good' + a particle'

        hěn + gāo = hěngāo 'very tall'

        hěn + cháng = hěncháng 'very long'

        hěn + kuài = hěnkuài 'very fast'

        3. A second tone changes to a first tone when it follows a first or another second         tone and is followed by any of the four full tones. For example:

        bā + shí + sì = bāshísì 'eighty four' (literally 8, 10, 4)

        shéi + lái + chī = shéiláichī 'who is coming to eat'

        There are other changes specific to certain words. For example, before a fourth         tone, the typically fourth tone bù 'negative marker' changes to a second tone.         Numbers like yī 'one' bā' eight' and qī 'seven' also change under certain         circumstances (http://clp.arizona.edu/cls/chn/chnpro/mtone/mtone.htm).

As can be seen from the above examples, the Mandarin tones can get quite complex when the neutral tones and tone sandhi are considered.

Conclusion

        This paper compared and contrasted the tones in the Punjabi and Mandarin languages. The tones in both Punjabi and Mandarin arose as a reinterpretation of consonant sounds and both are contour tone languages. But there are also differences between the Punjabi and Mandarin tones. Punjabi is a word tone language with three tones whereas Mandarin is a syllable tone language that has four basic tones. The Mandarin tonal system is also much more complex in that it has neutral tones on suffixes and particles and undergoes tone sandhi.

MAP 1. Map of the Punjabi speaking area in India and Pakistan

(http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/february/punjabi.html)

MAP 2. Map of the Mandarin speaking area in China

(http:www.lmp.ucla.edu)

REFERENCES

Bhatia, Tej K. (1993). Punjabi: A Cognitive Descriptive Grammar. London: Routledge.

Mandarin. Retrieved January 13, 2008 from UCLA Language Materials Project from http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=78&menu=004

Mandarin (linguistics) (January 2008). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 13, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(linguistics)

Bourgerie, Dana S. (2001). Mandarin Tones. Retrieved January 13, 2008 from http://clp.arizona.edu/cls/chn/chnpro/mtone/mtone.htm

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Punjabi (2007). Languages of the World. Retrieved December 18, 2007 from http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/february/punjabi.html

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Punjabi Language (1997). NRIOL. Retrieved December 18, 2007 from http://www.nriol.com/punjab-page.asp

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Tones (linguistics) (January 2008). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 13, 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)

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