Whereas part I and part II of this series have explored vocal inflection in English — and what makes it so hard for machines to get right — this final post in our series on vocal inflection explores tone in a radically different way.
Linguists describe Chinese, Vietnamese and a great many other southeast Asian and also west African languages as tonal. This use of “tonal” contrasts with our use of “intonation” and “inflection” in our exploration of text-to-speech. Whereas we explored the emotive and discourse meanings behind “up” (pronounced with a rising tone), “up” (pronounced with a falling tone), and “up” (pronounced with a compound falling-then-rising tone) in English, speakers of tone languages use tones [...]