Tone letter

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The tone contours of Standard Mandarin. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥˥ ˧˥ ˨˩˦ ˥˩.
The tone contours of Standard Mandarin. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥˥ ˧˥ ˨˩˦ ˥˩.

Tone letters are written characters that represent the tones of a language, especially contour tones, that were invented by Yuen Ren Chao and adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet.[1]

Tone letters are schematics of the pitch contour of a tone, drawn iconically in the line of writing and ending in a vertical bar. Chao divided the tone space into five by employing the concept of a five-line musical staff, each corresponding to a different level of pitch.[2][3] (With the possible exception of some of the Omotic languages of Ethiopia, no known language depends on more than five distinct pitch levels.) These letters are written at the end of a syllable.

For example, Standard Mandarin has the following four tones in syllables spoken in isolation:

Contour Tone
letter		 Tone
number
High level ma˥˥ ma1
Mid rising ma˧˥ ma2
Low dipping ma˨˩˦ ma3
High falling ma˥˩ ma4

Diacritics may also be used to transcribe tone in the IPA. For example, tone 3 in Mandarin is a low tone between other syllables, and can be represented as such phonemically. The four Mandarin tones can therefore also be transcribed [má, mǎ, mà, mâ]. (Note that these are not the convention of Pinyin, and so in this case IPA diacritics may be confusing.)

The Mandarin high level tone in the table is composed of two elements, both high. This produces a longer line in OpenType fonts than does a single element, of a comparable length to the other tone letters. However, when a tone is short ("abrupt") because of a final glottal stop or other consonant, for example in Standard Cantonese, a single element may be used: [mak˥ ].

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[edit] Tone letters as numerals

Tone letters are also transcribed as numerals, particularly in Asian and Mesoamerican tone languages. Until the spread of OpenType computer fonts starting in 2000–2001, tone letters were not practical for many applications. A numerical substitute was, and is, commonly used for tone contours, with a numerical value assigned to the beginning, end, and sometimes middle of the contour. For example, the four Mandarin tones are commonly transcribed ma55, ma35, ma214, ma51. ("Ma55" is usually written instead of "ma5" to avoid confusion with tone number 5, or to show this is not an "abrupt" tone.)

However, these numerals are ambiguous. In Asian languages such as Chinese, convention assigns the lowest pitch a 1 and the highest a 5. Conversely, in Africa and Mesoamerica the lowest is assigned a 5 and the highest a 1. In the case of Mesoamerican languages, the number of pitch levels is also restricted to the number of contrastive levels in a given language. For example, a Mixtecan language with three level tones will denote them as 1 (high /˥/), 2 (mid /˧/) and 3 (low /˩/). A reader accustomed to Chinese usage will misinterpret the Mixtec low tone as mid, and the high tone as low. Because tone letters are iconic, and musical staves are internationally recognized with high tone at the top and low tone at the bottom, tone letters do not suffer from this ambiguity.

[edit] Tone levels

Authors have used the tone levels of the tone letter to refer to different linguistic and psychological correlates. The International Phonetic Association suggests using the tone letters to represent phonemic contrasts. For example, if a language has a single falling tone, then it should be transcribed as /˥˩/, even if this tone does not fall across the entire pitch range.[4]

For the purposes of a precise linguistic analysis there are at least three approaches: linear, exponential and language-specific. A linear approach is to map the tone levels directly to fundamental frequency (f0), by subtracting the tone with lowest f0 from the tone with highest f0, and dividing this space into four equal f0 intervals. Tone letters are then chosen based on the f0 tone contours over this region.[5][6] This linear approach is systematic, but it does not always align the beginning and end of each tone with the proposed tone levels.[7] Chao's earlier description of the tone levels is an exponential approach. Chao proposed five tone levels, where each level is spaced two semitones apart.[2] A later description provides only one semitone between levels 1 and 2, and three semitones between levels 2 and 3.[3] This updated description may be a language-specific division of the tone space.[8]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ (Chao 1930)
  2. ^ a b (Chao 1956)
  3. ^ a b (Chao 1968)
  4. ^ (International Phonetic Association 1999, p. 14)
  5. ^ (Vance 1977)
  6. ^ (Du 1988)
  7. ^ (Cheng 1973)
  8. ^ (Fon 2004)

[edit] References

  • Chao, Yuen-Ren (1930), “A system of tone-letters”, Le Maître Phonétique 30: 24-27 
  • Chao, Yuen-Ren (1956), “Tone, intonation, singsong, chanting, recitative, tonal composition and atonal composition in Chinese.”, in Halle, Moris, For Roman Jakobson, The Hague: Mouton, pp. 52-59 
  • Chao, Yuen-Ren (1968), A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 
  • Cheng, Teresa M. (1973), “The Phonology of Taishan”, Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1 (2): 256-322 
  • Du, Tsai-Chwun (1988), Tone and Stress in Taiwanese, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan  (Ph.D. Dissertation)
  • Fon, Janice & Chaing, Wen-Yu (2004), “What does Chao have to say about tones?”, Journal of Chinese Linguistics 27 (1): 13-37 
  • International Phonetic Association (1999), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 
  • Vance, Timothy J. (1977), “Tonal distinctions in Cantonese”, Phonetica 34: 93-107 

[edit] See also

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