Pavlos

The other half is scope, and it is the part that makes the distinction click for most people.

Tone in a tonal language operates at the level of the syllable. Every syllable carries one, and the tone travels with that syllable wherever it appears in a sentence.

Intonation in English operates across a phrase or sentence. The rise is not on the word, it is on the utterance, and the same rise applies to a one-word question and to a fifteen-word one.

You can hear this in a longer example. "You are going home?" rises at the end regardless of which words are in it. That contour belongs to the sentence, not to any word in it — which is exactly what a tonal system does not do.

English does use pitch heavily and meaningfully. It just uses it at a different level of the structure.

Worth naming the pattern you noticed, because it is real and interesting: words for moral strength drift towards implying excess.

It has happened repeatedly. Righteous went from correct to self-satisfied. Pious went from devout to sanctimonious. Virtuous has picked up a faint priggishness. Puritanical was once a description and is now an accusation.

The likely reason is that describing somebody's morality in the third person is usually done either in admiration, which tends to use plainer language, or in complaint, which needs a word — so the strong words get recruited for the complaint and take on its colour.

Which is why the surviving neutral options are the plainest ones. Principled has held up precisely because it is unexciting.

Worth adding that the phrase circulates in several variants, and some of them do use the second structure — versions along the lines of "keep it short and simple" appear in print from the first half of the twentieth century.

So there is a family of similar advice, and the specific four-word form with the comma is one member of it. Some of the variants exist precisely because people found the insult version too rude to print, and softened it.

That is a useful reminder about phrases of this kind: they usually have several attested forms and a tidy single origin story is often constructed later. Accounts attributing it confidently to one person and one moment should be treated with some caution.

Speaking as somebody whose first language has genders: the honest answer is that it is a relief, and it is barely noticeable after the first week.

Gender in a first language is not experienced as information. Nobody thinks "the table is feminine" — the article and the adjective endings simply arrive with the word, as one unit. So losing it does not feel like losing meaning, it feels like a set of endings you no longer have to produce.

The direction of difficulty is overwhelmingly the other way. An English speaker learning a gendered language faces a genuinely hard problem: several thousand arbitrary assignments to memorise, agreement to apply consistently across articles, adjectives and sometimes verbs, and no reliable rules — only patterns with exceptions.

So English nouns are one fewer thing to track. What English replaces it with, in terms of difficulty, is elsewhere entirely: the article system, phrasal verbs, and spelling.

One thing English speakers underestimate about learning the gendered direction: the difficulty is not memorising the gender, it is producing the agreement in real time.

Knowing that a word is feminine is a fact you can look up. Selecting the right article, adjective ending and sometimes past participle while composing a sentence at speaking pace is a different skill, and it is the one that takes years.

Which is why learners often have good gender knowledge in writing and lose it entirely in conversation. It is not a knowledge problem by then, it is a processing one.