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Chart invented by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao illustrating the contours of the four tones of Standard Chinese. When the pitch descends, the contour is called a falling tone; when it ascends, a rising tone; when it descends and then returns, a dipping or falling-rising tone; and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a peaking or rising-falling tone.
For example, an Otomanguean language with three level tones may denote them as 1 (high /˥/), 2 (mid /˧/) and 3 (low /˩/). (Three-tone systems occur in Mixtecan, Chinantecan and Amuzgoan languages.) A reader accustomed to Chinese usage will misinterpret the Mixtec low tone as mid, and the high tone as low. In Chatino, 0 is high and 4 is low. [11]
A trade language will typically need to explicitly explain more of the context than a dialect which can assume a high level of shared context. Because a low-context setting cannot rely on a shared understanding of potentially ambiguous messages, low-context cultures tend to give more information or to be precise in their language. [38]
Thus, level tones are numbered ①②, the rising tones ③④, the departing tones ⑤⑥, and the entering (checked) tones ⑦⑧. In Yue (incl. Cantonese) the dark entering tone further splits into high (高陰入) and low (低陰入) registers, depending on the length of the nucleus, for a total of nine tone classes
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 ...
The difference between high and mid level tone (1 and 3) is about twice that between mid and low level (3 and 6): 60 Hz to 30 Hz. Low falling (4) starts at the same pitch as low level (6), but then drops; as is common with falling tones, it is shorter than the three level tones.
In terms of programming, a high-level programming language is one which has a relatively high level of abstraction, and manipulates conceptual functions in a structured manner. A low-level programming language is one like assembly language that contains commands closer to processor instructions.
(The important work of Kenneth Pike on the same subject [18] had the four pitch levels labelled in the opposite way, with (1) being high and (4) being low). In its final form, the Trager and Smith system was highly complex, each pitch phoneme having four pitch allophones (or allotones); there was also a Terminal Contour to end an intonation ...