There's a truism among language teachers that errors in syntax made by learners will be corrected by native speakers. Ditto for errors of vocabulary. But errors of intonation will not be heard as such. If a learner speaks using the 'wrong tone of voice', the native speakers will assume that the tone was intentional.
(English speakers speaking spanish sound 'sing-song' and often patronising to spanish listeners. Germans speaking english may sound bullying. Italians speaking english to me sometimes sound as if every statement is a question.)

So, my question is: Does Esperanto have a standard intonation curve? Are there any esperantists on the list who have been mis- understood when speaking to other esperantists simply because eg. a tentative hypothesis was taken as a dogmatic assertion?
Is there any record that Zamenhof designed EO to be as 'intonation transparant' as possible?

Also: I speak EO with stress-timing. Presumably a French or Portugese speaker will speak it with syllable-timing. Does this cause any problems with intelligibility?

--- Last night I asked my boyfriend (he's a professional linguist who can't see the point of constructing a language) about intonation curves in tonal languages.

It seems that subtle variations in the lexical tone are standardly used by native speakers to give emphasis (or de-emphasis) to cirtain words, and to show the speakers attitude to what they are saying. Unfortunately, the variations were too subtle for him to detect.

Perhaps 'tone of voice' is easily supported by (say) Mandarin, which has only four tones and is quite standardised, but not by (say) the Shanghai dialect, which has eight tones, and is far from standardised. Just an idea.

Copyright © 1997, Jack Durst,
Last updated: 8 October, 1997