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An old illustration of the four tone classes, in their traditional representation on a hand. In modern use, the diacritics all face the character, as in the table above. The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology (simplified Chinese: 四声; traditional Chinese: 四聲; pinyin: sìshēng) are four traditional tone classes [1] of Chinese ...
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use. Pitch contours of the four Mandarin tones In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4.
Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
According to statistics from the "Chinese Character Information Dictionary", [10] among the 7,785 mainland standardized Chinese characters of the dictionary, there are 7,038 monophonic characters, accounting for 90.405%. Among the polyphonic characters, 671 are of one character two sounds, accounting for 8.619%; 69 characters of three sounds ...
The rhyme dictionaries organize Chinese characters by their pronunciation, according to a hierarchy of tone, rhyme and homophony. ... The four tones of Middle Chinese ...
This led Duan Yucai to suggest that Old Chinese lacked the departing tone. Wang Niansun (1744–1832) and Jiang Yougao (d.1851) decided that the language had the same tones as Middle Chinese, but some words had later shifted between tones, a view that is still widely held among linguists in China. [134] [135]
The four tones of Middle Chinese—level (平), rising (上), departing (去), and entering (入) tones—are categorized into level (平) tones and oblique (仄) tones. Tones that are not level are oblique. When tone patterns are used in poetry, the pattern in which level and oblique tones occur in one line is often the inverse of that of the ...
For example, Standard Chinese has four–five tones and the digits 1–5 or 0–4 are assigned to them; Cantonese has 6–9 tones, and the digits from 0 or 1 to 6 or 9 are assigned to them. In this case, Mandarin tone 4 has nothing to do with Cantonese tone 4, as can be seen by comparing the tone charts of Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese ...