…However, in this video (from a Norwegian), the tone examples don’t seem to quite agree with what’s written in the TYS book. I mean that what I’m hearing from the 2nd video is that both sorts of tones are double tones, but one ends on a rising note and one ends on a falling note.
It’s probably a question of how you look at them, and just another example of the fact that you can hardly ever describe sounds adequately in writing, and you simply have to hear them:
(It’s not really a hardship though to look at a pretty Norwegian girl in the interests of learning… )
Tagging @JustinandEirwen also. Although I kind of knew at some level that Swedish and Norwegian were not really fully tonal in the sense that that Chinese is, I didn’t really know enough about the subject to be very specific. It turns out that Wikipedia (who would have thought…?) has quite a good description of the situation:
In addition, what I was trying to say about use of tone in English, they describe here:
Other usage[edit]
In a wider and less common sense of the term, “pitch accent” is sometimes also used to describe intonation, such as methods of conveying surprise, changing a statement into a question, or expressing information flow (topic–focus, contrasting), using variations in pitch. A great number of languages use pitch in this way, including English as well as all other major European languages. They are often called intonation languages.
As far as Swedish goes (and I think a lot of this is true of Norwegian), this video is the least-confusing way of describing the pitch accent that I have so far come across:
(ironically, when he speaks English, it is with the most boring monotone that I can imagine, but I think it’s worth watching / listening to anyway. For my own purposes, I’d like to find something like that which is explicitly about Norwegian, but the ones I have found so far have not been at all as well-explained (even when introduced by charming females ).
Thanks Mike - there is at least one dialect of Dutch (some say it s a separate language ) - Limburgs, where pitch accent also occurs - and, like Swedish, it sounds like people are singing instead of speaking sometimes.
)