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Chinese makes frequent use of particles to express certain meanings such as doubt, query, command, etc., reducing the need to use intonation. However, intonation is still present in Chinese (expressing meanings rather similarly as in standard English), although there are varying analyses of how it interacts with the lexical tones.
In phonetics, contour describes speech sounds that behave as single segments but make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. Such sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants. Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high ...
Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone ...
A tone contour or contour tone is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East Asia , Southeast Asia , West Africa , Nilo-Saharan languages , Khoisan languages , Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America .
The tone contours of Mandarin Chinese. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥, ˧˥, ˨˩˦, ˥˩.. A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s [2] by adding a reference stave to the existing convention of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
"Old Chinese was a toneless language. Tones arose between Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese (that is between 500 BCE and 500 CE) as a result of the loss of final laryngeals." The four tones of Middle Chinese, 平 píng level, 上 shǎng rising, 去 qù departing, and 入 rù entering, all
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Normally, the sound of one Chinese character is one syllable. Mandarin Chinese totally has about 1,300 different syllables with tones (only over 400 syllables if the tones are not taken into account). And modern Chinese has more than 10,000 characters, with an average of over 7.5 characters per syllable. That means homophonic characters widely ...