ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -languages (except Swahili) are “tone languages, ” in the sense that the meaning of words depends on the tone or pitch in which they are said. Consequently, instrumental music-or even natural sounds such as birdsong-often imitates or suggests meaningful phrases of the spoken language.

Detailed explanation-2: -In accordance with this classification the languages of the continent are exhaustively assigned to five families: Semitic, Hamitic, Bantu, Sudanese, and Bushman. The basis of classification is an analysis into linguistic types in which each linguistic family is distinguished by a set of structural characteris-tics.

Detailed explanation-3: -Uses of tone That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong. However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical.

Detailed explanation-4: -A tone language, or tonal language, is a language in which words can differ in tones (like pitches in music) in addition to consonants and vowels. Many languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Hmong, Punjabi, Sylheti, Chittagonian, Yorùbá, Igbo, Luganda, Ewe, and Cherokee are tonal.

Detailed explanation-5: -Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word.