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Tonal languages for the tone-deaf [or a horse is a hoarse of course of coarse], An Enterprising question

Q: How do tone-deaf Chinese communicate? (L.A., Sandia Park, New Mexico)

A: Tone-deaf Chinese talk just like other Chinese. Their profound musical disability makes no real difference in understanding and talking a tonal language.

Mandarin Chinese pictographs [Courtesy of Rick Harbaugh ©, used with permission]

You’d think it would. Tone deaf means a person cannot hear the difference between two successive tones. The two tones are indistinguishable. In a tonal language, like Chinese, different tones give words different meanings.

Here’s an example of two different tones each meaning a different word from the Mandarin Chinese dialect (using diacritics to indicate the tones). See figure for the corresponding pictographs.

So, you’d think that a tone-deaf Chinese would be stuck. How can he tell the difference in speech between, say, "woman" and "horse" with only their distinct tones to distinguish the meanings?

Easily enough, it turns out. Mostly, he uses context and other language clues. Homonyms in Chinese (or English: "I’m a little hoarse"), rarely confuse a listener — when heard in context. But also, it’s easier to distinguish varying tones. Moreover, the tones we use in languages are coarse discriminators that even a disabled person can manage. To convey meaning differences, speech requires tone distinctions three to six times greater than melodies do for musical nuances.

A child learns to talk and to sing spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction. Our brains are hard-wired for music and language. Apparently, tone-deafness (called amusia) results from a slight disruption in the wiring of the auditory cortex — similar to color-blindness or dyslexia.

"Music is probably the only domain in which fine-grained pitch discrimination is required for its appreciation," report Julie Ayotte, Isabelle Peretz and Krista Hyde in a tone-deaf study. Accordingly, a "degraded pitch perception system" may compromise music perception but leave speech intonation relatively unaffected. "Yet, the same pitch-tracking mechanism may subserve both domains," they conclude.

We often think of "tone deafness" in its lay meaning — "unable to carry a tune or sing a song." That’s different from the medical meaning of "inability to distinguish successive tones." Almost all people (except the medically tone deaf) can learn to sing with training.

Perhaps much the same happens for tone-deaf Chinese. With the help of language cues, they can distinguish varying tones and learn the gross tonal discriminations of their language. As they learn to talk, they receive training in its use.

Further Reading:

Julie Ayotte, Isabelle Peretz, and Krista Hyde. "Congenital amusia, a group study of adults afflicted with a music-specific disorder" Brain, Vol.125, No. 2, 238-251, Feb. 1, 2002.

Wikipedia: Tone deaf

Rick Harbaugh: Chinese characters and culture

Q: How large is the Star Trek ship — if it were real? (Tom, Miami, Florida)

A: By "Star Trek ship" I bet you mean the USS Enterprise. Actually, Star Trek boasts 650 star ships (including alien ship designs) but Enterprise is surely most famous. Eight starships bore the renowned name. The Enterprise NX-01 was the first Enterprise, captained by Jonathan Archer in the fifth (2001 to 2005) TV series Star Trek: Enterprise.

USS Enterprise NX-01, the first Enterprise. [Courtesy of Uwe Sauder ©, used with permission]

Arguably the most famous Enterprise was the NCC-1701 and its many generations (1701-A through 1701-J). Captain James T. Kirk commanded the NCC-1701 in The Original Series and the first three movies. The NCC-1701 served a good 40 years, 20 under Kirk.

The ship dies in battle when Captain Kirk sacrifices the bloodied and disabled vessel while fighting Klingons. Eventually, the good captain commands the next Enterprise,the NCC-1701-A.

USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Captain Kirk’s and (a later generation) Captain Picard’s ship [Courtesy of Wikipedia]

Three Enterprise generations and nearly a century later, Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanded the even more powerful NCC-1701-D and the NCC-1701-E in The Next Generation — the highest rated of all the Star Trek series.

The table shows the Enterprise fictional sizes and the actual size of the Voyager spacecraft.

The Enterprise NCC-1701 is almost twice the width and height of the International Space Station (ISS) and six times the ISS length.

That, however, isn’t a fair comparison since the ISS just orbits Earth, while the Enterprise traverses the Universe.

We’ve got a few starships of our own. How about Voyager 2 — presently zooming toward the brightest star in our skies? She’ll reach Sirius in a mere 300,000 years.

Voyager 2 will easily fit inside a 13-foot (4-m) box, not counting her booms. So the Enterprise NCC 1701 — if she existed — is about 200,000 times more massive and 40,000 times bigger (i.e., 70 times longer, 30 times wider and almost 20 times higher) than the real (and tiny) Voyager.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia: Star Trek

Ex Astris Scientia, Bernd Schneider’s Star Trek Site

NASA: International Space Station

Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ NASA: Voyager web site

(Answered Oct. 7, 2005)