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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.
m~ — pronounced
with a long high level tone, meaning mother
mă — pronounced with a
low tone, dipping down briefly before slowly rising to the high-~
tone, meaning horse
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.
|
Characteristic |
NX-01 |
NCC-1701 |
Voyager |
|
Launched |
2151 |
2245 |
1977 |
|
Mass |
130,000 t (130 million kg) |
190,000 t (190 million kg) |
0.9 t (815 kg) |
|
Length |
738 ft (225 m) |
948 ft (289 m) |
~13 ft (~4m) |
|
Width |
446 ft (136 m) |
427 ft (130 m) |
~13 ft (~4m) |
|
Height |
108 ft (33 m) |
220 ft (67 m) |
~13 ft (~4m) |
|
Max speed |
Warp 5.2 * |
Warp 7.0 |
Warp 0.04 ** or 0.0001 c |
|
|
- *Warp is light speed in a vacuum (300,000 km/s).
- ** Extrapolating the Warp
speed formula to sublight speed, we get (v/c)^(1/3) = 0.0376.
- In
the real world, it’s impossible to exceed light speed.
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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)
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