From: "Jim Grossmann"

From: "Thomas R. Wier"

> No, not necessarily. All children are actually born with the ability
> to distinguish all possible phones, but they lose this ability some
> several months after birth as they acclimatize to their speech
> environment. This latent ability could however be preserved in a few
> individuals who have the phonetic equivalent of perfect pitch. Indeed,
> analogously, people who speak languages which employ tonal phonemic
> contrasts essentially all have perfect pitch.

From: Moi

> You apparently have not endured an evening in a Chinese karaoke parlor. :)

Again from: "Jim Grossmann"

> Careful! AFAIK, the use of tone contrasts does not require perfect (aka
> absolute) pitch. For example, "high" tone means high for the speaker,
> relative to the speaker's production of the other tones. It also means
> high relative to the tone contour of the utterance, making "high" tone
> lower, for example, as the tone of the whole sentence gets lower toward
the
> end.
>
> As for perfect pitch meaning absolute pitch, I refer the readers to Aaron
> Copeland's "What to Listen For in Music." I also speak as one who has
> absolute pitch. Yup! I'm my own pitch pipe, but that makes me neither
> better nor worse than anyone else when it comes to taking courses in tonal
> languages like Chinese.

I only joked with Tom's earlier post because I didn't know where he wished
to go (if the post was meant to go anywhere) (retracted since Tom posted as
I was writing this). This thread seems to be debunking, or playing into, a
couple of stereotypes (not necessarily expressed here, but which I've
heard). Namely:

1. Tonal languages are "musical". Chinese, Ancient Greek, and Swedish are
all described as "sing-songy" or "musical". Japanese, for whatever reasons,
is excluded. The Irish dialect of English is described as "lilting", yet no
one suggests you have to have perfect pitch to speak it (phonemic contrasts
aside).

2. "I'm tone deaf, so I can't speak Chinese well." COP OUT! Tones have more
to do with inTONation than whether you can hit high E or not. If you tell
someone to pronounce (the unlikely Cantonese example) go1hing3wooi6 ("happy
society") the same way you'd pronounce: "yeah, yeah, yeah" (as said by a
teenager who'd just been told by his mother to clean his room), you'd get
more accurate results than telling them to start at (I don't know) C and go
to A and then low F. Jim's point is also well taken; a woman's first tone
(55) and a man's first tone (55) aren't both going to start at high E; in
addition, a first tone at the beginning of a sentence (say, high C) ain't
the same tone at the end of a sentence (say, middle A). And indeed, the
musical reference itself is misleading.

3. Tonal language speakers have perfect pitch (pitch to intonation
correlation). Really! Hang a Chinese karaoke parlor (I mean it). It sounds
like pigs going to slaughter. I seriously doubt that Thai crooners fare much
better.

4. People with language acumen are good at music and vice versa. I have the
least anecdotal evidence on this one. Many gay men I know have a
language/music adeptness link, but who knows how conclusive that is.

I'm not an expert, so I don't know about the reality of the music/language
link, but some of the above evidence (yes, I've set up my own straw man)
seems specious at best.

Kou