1 What is the greatest difference between vowels and consona

2021年1月26日发(作者：linjun)

Compare Articulation of Vowels
between Chinese and English

















Vowels of


Chinese
Chinese is known as tone language which changes in four forms,
affecting the meanings of individual words. So in the sense of
distinguishing the mean of a word, tone is vitally important to Chinese.
For example, a syllable such as [ma] can have at least four meaning
depending on the tone which it is spoken. In addition, more meanings are
found if we consider the different characters with the same pronunciation
and the tone form.

In the study of phonetics, syllable, stress, tone and intonation have
formed features which are those aspects of speech that involve more than
single sound segments. Many languages use tone in a more limited way.
Somali, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese,
fewer than half of the words have drop in pitch; however, tone seems
more important to Chinese in some way than any other languages. We
can find some clues from the following three aspects.

In the first place
, Chinese is a tone language while English is not.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical
meaning
—
that is, to distinguish or inflect words. English and Chinese
belong to two different language systems. A lot of linguists have done
researches on the English and Chinese phonetics, but they hold different
views on the concept of tone. So far as the English and Chinese languages
are concerned, C.L. Wrench pointed out that Chinese is a tone language