1 What is the greatest difference between vowels and consonants 中英文元音对比.doc

Compare Articulation of Vowels between Chinese and English Vowels of Chinese Chinese is known as tone language which changes in four forms, affecting the meanings of individual words. So in the sense of distinguishing the mean of a word, tone is vitally important to Chinese. For example, a syllable such as [ma] can have at least four meaning depending on the tone which it is spoken. In addition, more meanings are found if we consider the different characters with the same pronunciation and the tone form. ? In the study of phonetics, syllable, stress, tone and intonation have formed features which are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have drop in pitch; however, tone seems more important to Chinese in some way than any other languages. We can find some clues from the following three aspects. ????In the first place, Chinese is a tone language while English is not. Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. English and Chinese belong to two different language systems. A lot of linguists have done researches on the English and Chinese phonetics, but they hold different views on the concept of tone. So far as the English and Chinese languages are concerned, C.L. Wrench pointed out that Chinese is a tone language and English is an intonation language on which Lian Shu’neng agrees with in his book Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese; Some even consider that both English and Chinese are tone languages; some think that Chinese is both a kind of tone language and intonation language, while English is intonation language in that the change of tone causes the change of characters and their meanings in Chinese, but almost has no influence on the meaning of the words in English. However, the change of intona