Chinese tones

[seasurfer]

Thanks for the explanation seasurfer.

One more thing, how do speakers of tonal languages do to express the emotions I mentioned in my first post. For example, if a word has a falling tone (fourth tone) and the speaker wants to express surprise or doubt (for which I use a rising tone) ? Or giving an order with a verb having a rising tone (eg. "come !") ? How is that possible to combine ?

For example, the verb "to come" in Mandarin is 来 [lai2], so it has a rising intonation. How do people say "come !" without it sounding like a question ("come ?") ? Same for any other words and emotions.

Hi, Maciamo,

I will compare two languages, french and mandarin, hope this will help your understanding.

In french, we could say, ca va? and answer ca va. Using the same words, but changing the tone make the intention different.

Same with allez, with could just say allez? and answer allez. In french all we need to do is to raise the tone.

However, in Mandarin, the case is different, it is totally different from french, you can't change the tone of a word to make it sound like a question. You have to add words or change the way you ask.

Example:
来, meaning come. When you just say 来 to someone in the correct tone, it means asking a person to come.

If you want to ask the person whether you want to come or not, then you have to add words or change the way of asking.

You have to say 来嗎? The word 嗎 means asking a question and it also means a question mark, before the chinese import western style punctuation, there is no punctuation in chinese. So these kind of words act as a punctuation.　It is more or less like the japanese か。 In japanese, you don't need question mark at all, all you need is to add a か, and this will make it a question. Of course, in japanese, you can even do it without the か, but this don't apply to chinese.

Another example:
你好. ======== You are fine.
你好嗎? ====== Are you fine? or How are you?

The other way of making a chinese expression into a question is to add "or not".

Examples:
來 ====== come!
來不來 === come or not come?

好 ====== fine!
好不好 === fine or not fine?



In a nutshell, you cannot change the tone to make it sound like a question mark, because the tone just can't be change, changing the tone of a word will be misinterpreted as another word. Hope this help you.