A brief discussion on the similarities and differences between Chinese and Hungarian intonations from the perspective of Chinese teaching

Abstract

As for what intonation means, linguists Crystal and Trask have each given their own definitions, which are the two main views widely recognised by the academic world today. The former is a narrow definition, whereas the latter is broad. Among learners of Chinese as a second language, the students who are considered to have truly mastered the intonation of Chinese should be those whom native speakers cannot identify as foreigners just by hearing their’ voices. Therefore, the type of intonation discussed here is intonation in a broad sense.
Chinese and Hungarian are linguistically distant far apart and belong to different language families. Chinese is a tonal language. Zhao Yuanren (1922) believed that Chinese intonation includes sentence tone (intonation) and character tone (tonal morpheme). Chinese intonation is the result of sentence intonation being affected by a character’s tone. However, how does character tone affect sentence tone? This is obviously a complex process. Many Chinese linguists have done a lot of research trying to reveal this process and the relationship between sentence tone and character tone. In recent years, some scholars have achieved outstanding results with the help of experimental phonetics methods. We are glad to see that views on the characteristics of Chinese intonation have reached a consensus: the changes in Chinese intonation are changes of scale, not simply the changing of pitch, and tones are basically unchanged. The core elements of Chinese tones are the focus accent and boundary tone.
Hungarian is a non-tonal language, where focus and stress play a key role. A distinctive feature of Hungarian is that word stress is always placed on the first syllable. Focus position in Hungarian is mandatory and is always before the verb. In this article, we briefly discuss the similarities and differences between Chinese and Hungarian intonations from the perspective of Chinese teaching, with a view to contribute to the teaching of Chinese as a second language.