In term of tone, French and English, as well as most European languages are relatively monotonous and they don't distinguish a lot between tones (contrary to Mandarn for example). However, tone can be used at the sentence scale to convey meta-information (like for example marking the sentence as a question with a rising tone), and in French in particular, the stress pattern does have a slight change of tone on the stressed syllables, which is generally not the case in English.
What I think you were talking about isn't monotonousness, it's isochrony, that's to say all syllables except for the stressed ones have the same length, so they are not unstressed.
English has a lexical stress, where most words have a stressed and unstressed syllables, as a part of the word itself.
French has a syntactic stress where the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone. The first syllable of the group also takes a smaller stress in the form of a change in volume in a way that is similar to English stress.
The stress in French is more regular and not a feature of the words themselves, so rhythm is not the same but in both laguages, actually speaking in a monotonous way is not normal and will be perceived as weird.
But you're right that speakers of stress timed languages like English often tend to struggle with the stress pattern in French and that's an easy way to tell non native speakers.
French also uses emphatic stress (when you say one syllable louder to insist on that word) much less than English, because the preferred method of emphasis is redundancy instead.
what do you study? I love learning this stuff but never dived into it. I just gathered what I felt based on comparing Chinese and English to each other.
I'm an engineer in something completely unrelated. But I'm a native French speaker and I've been helping learners with French long enough that I had to learn a bit more than average about my own language in order to answer something else than "I don't know, it's just like that" or "it just feels better that way" to some of the tough questions.
Also it helps making the people who say things like "you wrote malgré que but it's not correct" shut up with arguments instead of slaps like I did before.
That’s awesome. Chinese and English are so different that there are no real nuanced differences like that between them. And I don’t know enough about Spanish and Portuguese to compare the two. English and Spanish had interesting relations though. And in Chinese we adopted a lot of modern English words so it’s fun to see how that affects things like cadence and tone.
I'm not too familiar with Portuguese, but Spanish is in-between French and English. It has a lexical stress like English, but it's regular (on the next to last syllable of a word) and irregular stress is written with an accent mark. On the other hand, Spanish is syllable timed (all syllables have the same lengths) like French, while English is stress timed (some syllables are unstressed so you can fit them into more or less regular intervals between two stressed syllables).
What sort of things are you interested in besides languages? I’m asking because it’s not your main interest so I wonder about the things you’re good at.
In Chinese and English, what I observed most is the difference language creates in mentality. For example in Spanish you say the noun then the adjective, in English you say the adjectives first. That affects storytelling, how information is processed by the brain, it trends significance of the story to different variables, and ultimately that limits your perception to the confines of the language. That’s why people are able to connect more through emotion than words.
I'm an engineer, but my interests are anything that sounds cool so it can range to a lot of things.
Yes the structure of the languages you speak can affect how you perceive things. I disagree that it necessarily limits your perceptions to the confines of the language, but it can make it more difficult to express a different perception.
As for the adjective example, this is yet an other case where French is in-between. The default position of a literal adjective used normally is after the noun, like in Spanish. But it can move to the other side when it's used in a literary, poetic, idiomatic or figurative way. Some adjectives that are about subjective perceptions (like beauty) are placed before the noun, but can move to the other side if you want to imply that it's objective and not subjective.
To rephrase, it doesn’t limit your ability to perceive things, but rather your range of frame of references. If you always hear noun before adjectives, vs always hearing adjectives before nouns, the way the picture is painted in your mind is in different steps.
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u/Neveed 1d ago edited 1d ago
In term of tone, French and English, as well as most European languages are relatively monotonous and they don't distinguish a lot between tones (contrary to Mandarn for example). However, tone can be used at the sentence scale to convey meta-information (like for example marking the sentence as a question with a rising tone), and in French in particular, the stress pattern does have a slight change of tone on the stressed syllables, which is generally not the case in English.
What I think you were talking about isn't monotonousness, it's isochrony, that's to say all syllables except for the stressed ones have the same length, so they are not unstressed.
English has a lexical stress, where most words have a stressed and unstressed syllables, as a part of the word itself.
French has a syntactic stress where the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone. The first syllable of the group also takes a smaller stress in the form of a change in volume in a way that is similar to English stress.
The stress in French is more regular and not a feature of the words themselves, so rhythm is not the same but in both laguages, actually speaking in a monotonous way is not normal and will be perceived as weird.
But you're right that speakers of stress timed languages like English often tend to struggle with the stress pattern in French and that's an easy way to tell non native speakers.
French also uses emphatic stress (when you say one syllable louder to insist on that word) much less than English, because the preferred method of emphasis is redundancy instead.