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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
"Neutral Tones" is a poem written by Thomas Hardy in 1867. Forming part of his 1898 collection Wessex Poems and Other Verses, it is the most widely praised of his early poems. [1] It is about the end of a relationship, and carries strong emotional appeal despite its "neutral tones".
When 一 is used between two reduplicated words, it may become neutral in tone, e.g. kànyikàn ('to take a look of') The numbers 七 (qī; 'seven') and 八 (bā; 'eight') sometimes display similar tonal behavior as 一 yī, but for most modern speakers they are always pronounced with first tone.
Examples for these tones: ciūⁿ (elephant), bâ (leopard), bhè (horse), di (pig), zŭa (snake), āh (duck), lok (deer). And, a neutral tone, sometimes indicated by å(aj) in DT, has no specific contour; its pitch always depends on the tones of the preceding syllables. Taiwanese speakers refer to this tone as the "neutral tone" (Chinese: 輕聲).
In bopomofo, the mark for first tone is usually omitted but can be included, [19] [20] while a dot above indicates the fifth tone (also known as the neutral tone). In pinyin, a macron (overbar) indicates the first tone, and the lack of a marker usually indicates the fifth (light) tone.
These two types, the post-nucleus and the pre-nucleus neutral tone, exhibit different tone sandhi behavior. Disyllabic neutral tone words are also attested, as are some inter-nuclei neutral tones, mainly connected to the use of 蜀 siŏh / suoʔ˥ / in verbal reduplication. [30]
Neutral tone is pronounced as mid-low level 33~22. The syllable before neutral tone does not undergo tone sandhi, but preserves its original tone. Aside from having the neutral tone, unstressed syllables may undergo other changes, the most prominent of them being the loss the glottal stop and voicing of the initial: [16]
There are also weak syllables, including grammatical particles such as the interrogative ma (嗎; 吗) and certain syllables in polysyllabic words. These syllables are short, with their pitch determined by the preceding syllable. [85] Such syllables are commonly described as being in the neutral tone.