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Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese has a neutral tone that appears on weak syllables.
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 ...
Furthermore, many varieties of Chinese deleted Middle Chinese final consonants, but these contrasts may have been preserved, helping lead to tonogenesis of contemporary multitonal systems.) Traditional Chinese dialectology reckons syllables ending in a stop consonant as possessing a fourth tone, known technically as a checked tone.
The voiceless stops that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages.In addition, Old Chinese is commonly thought to have syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ [1] [2] (sometimes called the "long entering tone" while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone").
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 ...
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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.
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