Which is the more tonal language?

[Wasabi]

I was wondering whether English or Japanese has more tonally determined
words, after the following minimal pair for "content" occurred to me today:

Content management [HL LLL]
Content management [LH HHL]

--
_______________________________________________________

Gordon's first law:
If a research project is not worth doing, it is not worth doing well.
_______________________________________________________

[muchan]

On Sep 15, 9:48 pm, Wasabi <blue.mounta...@org.invalid> wrote:
> I was wondering whether English or Japanese has more tonally determined
> words, after the following minimal pair for "content" occurred to me today:
>
> Content management [HL LLL]
> Content management [LH HHL]
>

I don't get what you mean with "tonnally determined words".

Japanese has pitch accent, English has stress accent.
You can't tell HLLLL things of English words.
They don't have pitch accent, just have place for stress accents.

(Do you want to say with [HL LLL] and [LH HHL] for コンテント？)
I can't imagine any Japanese say コンテント with [LHHHL].
for katakana word, I'd say
コンテンツ　HLLLL
コンテンツ・マネージメント　LHHHH LHHLLLL

muchan

[Sean]

I can think of one case where pitch might be a factor in English.

- I have to eke out a living.

- Eek! A mouse!

Well, maybe not.....

[jnixon]

English is stress-accented. Notice how stress, not pitch
differentiates "Ground hog meat" and Groundhog meat".

[Dan Rempel]

jnixon wrote:
> English is stress-accented. Notice how stress, not pitch
> differentiates "Ground hog meat" and Groundhog meat".

Course, stress is a combination of pitch, volume, and duration...

Dan

[Sean]

Not to mention heartburn.

[Dan Rempel]

Indeed.