Firefly Movie News (Just a little blip)

[Simplicity]

The fact that contempoprary Chinese is dependant on tone does not preclude the possibility that the tonal nature of the language could change in the future.

Around Shakespeare's time, there was what is called "The Great Vowel
Shift". Every vowel sound comes from a particular place inside the mouth.
"ahhh" comes from the back of the throat, wheras "Aeee" comes from the back of the palate. "oooo" from the lips... Well, the vowel sounds essentially all played musical chairs and rotated where they originated in the mouth.

No one knows why.

You can see it in the pronouns... "He" or "she" ends with an "eeeeee" sound. But most other words that end with an 'e' either
sound like "ehh" or nothing at all. "Make", "Cope", "Tome"...

And if you ever listened to Old English... Gah... It's incomprehensible.

If language can suddenly make such a massive shift, you'd better believe
tones could change over time. Easy fo' sheezy.

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

Cordo, that's interesting -- I've heard from other Chinese speakers that the actors did a pretty good job. Is it possible they were coached by someone with a different dialect, from a different region of China?

Nope, their speech is non-tonal. In any case I've done some reading on this and it appears they were trying to speak standard mandarin. Maybe your Chinese-speaking friends were impressed they could speak anything beyond "ni hao".

 

[RangerWickett]

Do you know how hard it would be to comprehend tonal Chinese without the tones? Imagine changing every word in English so that you only keep the first two letters. The difference between words in Chinese is heavily dependent on tones. Take those out, and it's really hard to tell words apart. For instance:

Do yo kn ho ha it wo be to co to Ch wi th to? Im ch ev wo in En so th yo on ke th fi tw le. Th di be wo in Ch is he de on to. Ta th ou, an it re ha to te wo ap.

 

[Umbran]

Do yo kn ho ha it wo be to co to Ch wi th to? Im ch ev wo in En so th yo on ke th fi tw le. Th di be wo in Ch is he de on to. Ta th ou, an it re ha to te wo ap.

Yo kn, it wa no th ha to se wh yo sa.

 

[Hand of Evil]

speaking of language here is something I thought interesting...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4356095/

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

I rewatched the "making of" featurette on the DVD last night (wasn't able to pay much attention the first time due to a three year old climbing all over me). Comments on it indicated they were aware that their pronunciations were way off, one of the writers even said "I'm sure people in China and Taiwan are commenting 'What the hell are they saying?'"

But yeah, it's just about impossible that tones would be stripped out of the language, RW's example to English gives you an idea, but just as an example:

gei wo ni de bi = with tone 3 on the "bi" means "give me your pen"
gei wo ni de bi = with tone 1 on the "bi" means "give me your female genitalia"