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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.
Modifier Tone Letters is a Unicode block containing tone markings for Chinese, Chinantec, Africanist, and other phonetic transcriptions. It does not contain the standard IPA tone marks, which are found in Spacing Modifier Letters .
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.
Chinese characters are sorted according to the Bopomofo expressions of their sounds by their order in the alphabet table, first by letters, then by tones in the order of "first tone, second tone, third tone, fourth tone, and fifth tone (also called neutral tone, light tone)".
This comparison of Standard Chinese transcription systems comprises a list of all syllables which are considered phonemically distinguishable within Standard Chinese. Gwoyeu Romatzyh employs a different spelling for each tone , whereas other systems employ tone marks or superscript numerals.
Sometimes these have been termed upper and lower registers respectively, but that may be a misnomer, as in some dialects the dark registers may have the lower tone, and the light register the higher tone. Chinese dictionaries mark the tones with diacritical marks at the four corners of a character: [6] ꜀平 level, ꜂上 rising, 去 ...
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
In Mandarin, the numeral "one", originally in tone 1, is pronounced in tone 4 if followed by a classifier in tone 1, 2, or 3. It is pronounced in tone 2 if the classifier has tone 4. In Taiwanese tone sandhi, tone 1 is pronounced as tone 7 if followed by another syllable in a polysyllabic word. Some romanization schemes, like Jyutping, use tone ...