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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.
The national pronunciation approved by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was later customarily called the Old National Pronunciation (老國音). Although declared to be based on Beijing pronunciation, it was actually a hybrid of northern and southern pronunciations. The types of tones were specified, but not the tone values.
As shown in the following table, tone marks for the second, third, and fourth tones are shared between bopomofo and pinyin. In bopomofo, the mark for first tone is usually omitted but can be included, [19] [20] while a dot above indicates the fifth tone (also known as the neutral tone).
A tone split occurs as a result of the loss of the voicing distinction in initial consonants. The split tones then merge back together except for Middle Chinese tone 1; hence Middle Chinese tones 1,2,3 become Mandarin tones 1,2,3,4. (Some syllables with original Mandarin tone 3 move to tone 4; see below.)
There has been much controversy over the relationship between final consonants and tones, and indeed whether Old Chinese lacked the tones characteristic of later periods, as first suggested by the Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di. [s] The four tones of Middle Chinese were first described by Shen Yue around AD 500.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Mandarin on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Tones are used in Hanyu Pinyin symbols, and they do not appear in Chinese characters. Tones are written on the finals of Chinese pinyin. If the tone mark is written over an i, then it replaces the tittle, as in yī. The first tone (flat or high-level tone) is represented by a macron ˉ added to the pinyin vowel:
For purposes of meters in Chinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are "flat/level tones" (平聲), while the rest are "oblique tones" (仄聲). This follows their regular evolution from the four tones of Middle Chinese. The first tone can be either high level or high falling usually without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken.
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