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For example, in Korean, the word for comb, pis, is a loan of the Chinese word bì 篦, which means that when the word comb was borrowed into Korean, there was still an [-s] sound at the end of the word that later disappeared from Chinese and gave rise to a departing 去 tone.
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.
It consists of 94 characters representing 94 words in classic Chinese. In modern Mandarin Chinese, all the words belong to the "shi" syllable, or 4 distinguishing syllables (shi1, shi2, shi3, shi4) which only differ in tones. The poem shows the popularity of homophones and the roles of tones in Chinese language. Original text:
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 ...
Thai has five phonemic tones: mid, low, falling, high and rising, sometimes referred to in older reference works as rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus and demissus, respectively. [2] The table shows an example of both the phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA. Thai language tone chart
For example, [ma˨˩˦] represents the mid-dipping pitch contour of the Chinese word for horse, 馬 ／ 马 mǎ. Single tone letters differentiate up to five pitch levels: ˥ 'extra high' or 'top', ˦ 'high', ˧ 'mid', ˨ 'low', and ˩ 'extra low' or 'bottom'. No language is known to depend on more than five levels of pitch.
Tones some Middle Chinese 'full-muddy (i.e. voiced obstruent) rising-tone' (全濁上聲) words now have colloquial 'subclear' (次清, aspirated) initials along with preserved 'muddy rising' (濁上) tone called yang rising (陽上), while literary initials are 'full-clear' (全清, tenuis) and merge into 'muddy departing' (濁去) tone called ...
For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from the split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones in a manner that is only partially predictable. [123]