Higgins vs. Mandarin

In his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw had modeled a genius professor Henry Higgins. The distinction of 130 vowel sounds make him an honorable phonetician. Yet Bernard Shaw seemed don’t know anything about tone language, throughout his life, he didn’t mention this topic. What is tone? I have given an address on YouTube to show it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZB9-vZFesk   Here I have to say that if a language don’t regard tone as a new property of sound, then, this language has to recognize it create more vowels. It can increase the number of vowel several times. The Chinese Mandarin has four tones, with its 35 normal vowels, the total number of vowels in this language is 35x4=140. That is to say, the normal speaker of this language has 10 extra vowels compare with Higgins 130 vowel sounds.

Why some language has tones other doesn’t? I shall answer this question next time, what I am going to say is that English is going to have tone gradually. The process started from the Great Vowel Shift (1350-1700) most long vowels were appeared at that time. What is the motivation of this shift? Very simple, this language required more species of sound to increase the communication and thinking speed. The example is in a certain case, you need to use the sound ‘ma’ to name two different things. How can you do this? The answer is you pull one ‘ma’ longer and push the other ‘ma’ shorter. If someone else accept this, then the long and short vowel appeared. After years practice, people found the longer vowel is unlike supposed long and short vowel is unlike supposed short, but we can distinguish them as well. What is the reason? That is the work of tone. Today the word ‘too’ similar the fourth tone of Mandarin while word ‘to’ similar the first tone.