Mark Millman argued:
1 quoted line
But Severian, since he doesn't speak Chinese, might well not notice the tones--they're not that obvious to non-speakers even in Cantonese, which is the more heavily tonal of the two major dialects.<
And of course, Chinese speakers don't use tones on every single word like written pinyin.
But, I'm sure it was Korean because Korea was just mentioned in that section of volume II. I doubt it was coincidental.
Christopher R. Culver <crculver at aol.com>
http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html