Talk:Four tones (Middle Chinese)

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This page is missing the kind of information that one expect to find in an encyclopedia-- a basic explanation of concepts for those without prior knowledge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.68.128.53 (talk) 17:20, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree. This page sucks from the perspective of somebody looking for a basic explanation. One of the few times on Wikipedia I had to go find another reference. I am not knowledgeable on this subject (hence my confusion and comment) and don't feel qualified to change this myself. submergency (talk) 03:19, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

This is an advanced topic, it can't just explain every term already explained on other pages over and over again. You are just too lazy to click on those links. --2.245.155.8 (talk) 20:06, 11 August 2016 (UTC)--2.245.155.8 (talk) 20:06, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't even say that X is rising and H is departing. Even though the page itself uses these symbols. iopq (talk) 04:12, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Tone name talk page

I moved a lot of content from Tone name. One might want to see Talk:Tone name. Asoer (talk) 04:09, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

You should have mentioned it in the edits and made a note of the move in the discussions page. It looked like vandalism until I found this page. Dylanwhs (talk) 14:36, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

cleanup / expansion

Expanding, caught some errors. Not sure about Dungan; I can't make sense of the tables in the Dungan language article. Tianshui has the same tone pattern (1-3-5-1) as we have here for Dungan, however. — kwami (talk) 10:09, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Since when is the 'level' and 'departing' tones now called the 'even' and 'going' tones? Dylanwhs (talk) 14:37, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Alternative translations. Both are common, and both old. — kwami (talk) 20:33, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Modern tones are more notable subject

I appreciate the coverage of historical and dialect tones, but the subject name primarily refers to the four tones of the present standard language, which should be mentioned more prominently. --JWB (talk) 19:23, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Ref? ASAIK, "four tones" always refers to the 四声, unless dab'd by context ("the four tones of MSC", etc). Also, I don't see how that would deserve anything more than a hatnote dab to MSC phonology. — kwami (talk) 20:33, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Just google "four tones" - apart from this article, all results I see for at least the first three pages are for the current Mandarin tones. This is common usage. --JWB (talk) 20:40, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Apart from things like "there are four tones in language X" (such as Mambila), I'm getting mixed returns. When by "Chinese" they mean Mandarin, then the four tones are the four tones of Mandarin. However, when by "Chinese" they mean Chinese, the four tones are the four tones of Chinese, as we have here. Since there's no point in having an article on the four tones of Mandarin (or the six tones of Cantonese, or the four tones of Mambila), it's appropriate that we cover what there is use in having an article on: the four tones of Chinese. — kwami (talk) 21:41, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Please make sure you log out of Google so you are not getting personalized results. Logging out and searching, again, I go through several pages with no trace of results for the Middle Chinese tones outside of this article in Wikipedia and mirrors. I would like to know what you get as the top-ranked result referring to Middle Chinese tones, and its rank, with non-personalized search.

The many search results suggest there is a good deal to say about the Mandarin tones, which I'm sure many editors would consider enough to support an article, but I'm not particularly concerned about that. What is bizarre is that the article lead does not have even a brief mention of the WP:COMMONNAME meaning directing the nonspecialist reader to the information they are seeking on the Mandarin four tones.

Note the first sentence of the article refers to "Chinese phonology", but the article Chinese phonology is a disambiguation between historical Chinese phonology and Modern Standard Chinese phonology. If this is ambiguous enough for disambiguation in the article namespace, why not in this article's lead? --JWB (talk) 09:32, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

I was searching Google Books.

Hatnote points taken. — kwami (talk) 10:02, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Min Nan (Hokkien)上聲 + Voiced Obstruent

I think Hokkien Min Nan has a split where historical Middle Chinese 上聲 has become modern 上聲 when the Middle Chinese initial is voiceless and when it is a voiced sonorant, but it has merged into modern 陽去聲 when the Middle Chinese initial is a voiced obstruent. This is like the case with Mandarin. So characters like 婦, 厚, 市, 似, 巳, 畤, 士 (though this one moved to 陽去聲 in Cantonese as well), 俟, 陫, 佇, 拒 are all 去聲 in both Taiwanese Hokkien Min Nan and Standard Beijing Mandarin, and all began with voiced obstruent initials (at least in the 廣韻, although there were of course some that didn't fit). Of course, this is all original research... at the moment. Michael Ly (talk) 02:49, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think that's what our refs have. If we got it wrong, it def. needs to be fixed. — kwami (talk) 04:03, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Did some digging: apparently it's a fairly well-attested phenomenon. This paper about a certain Cantonese particle in 陽上聲 stated that quite a few also did this 濁上歸去 phenomenon in Cantonese as well, depleting that tone category, and allowing this particle to fill in. It mentioned Mandarin as well, but no Min. There is the 何大安 (1988) paper, "濁上歸去"與現代方言, which should prove interesting. Michael Ly (talk) 17:06, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Some words changing tone is a lot different than the tone itself changing. Not all words are going to be regular developments. I don't know if particles might be less regular than lexical words. — kwami (talk) 08:22, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Oh the particle isn't an actual part of the phenomenon - it was the main focus of the paper, but the whole 濁上歸去 was there to explain the reduced numbers of tone 5 / 陽上聲 in Cantonese than expected. I agree for Cantonese it is a matter of some words changing... but in some of the other descendants of Middle Chinese there is a pattern of change. Mandarin notably does. According to this Douban note, there is a systematic change in the 漳州、厦门、台湾闽南语 variants that would mean it follows the 浊上归去 phenomenon, but not in 泉州闽南语. It is a little more complicated than the Mandarin version though - we would split voiced 上 into sonorant and obstruent, then split sonorant into literary and colloquial. The categories would then be: literary voiced sonorant 上 joining voiceless 上, and the other voiced 上 (colloquial voiced sonorant, all voiced obstruent) joining voiced 去 as per Mandarin. Hope that makes sense; and it would obviously be nice to find an academic reference. Michael Ly (talk) 12:37, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I knew that there were different literary and colloquial tone splits for several dialects, but I wasn't aware that Mandarin was among them. Definitely something to cover, and in the Mandarin phonology section too. — kwami (talk) 13:24, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Circled numbers system

• They're not attributed to a reference, so they're apparently arbitrary by a Wikipedia editor, not sourced information that has to be quoted unchanged.
• They're coded, with the low order bit indicating yin or unsplit vs. yang (why not distinguish yin and unsplit?) and the top two bits indicating which of the four tones it corresponds to (except the cases where some of another tone category has merged in). But why make the reader memorize a numeric code when there is plenty of space in cells for less cryptic description?
• The first column has almost all number 1, and so on. This indicates redundant information that a good information design could factor out, making the exceptions or changes more visible.
• They partially correspond to the tone numbering used for particular dialects, especially for the lowest numbers, but not completely, at least in the two cases I know most about, Mandarin and Cantonese. It would be good to give info on correspondence to the system used in the individual dialect, but inconsistent info is puzzling and worse than useless. Something other than numbers would be less confusing, if we are not going to conform to the dialect tone numbers.

--JWB (talk) 19:26, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

They're the standard numbering system, though sometimes you'll see 1–4 for yin and 5–8 for yang. (The circles are just a formatting convention for this article, done to make the numbers distinct from footnotes and the like.) The reason every dialect has (1) is that every dialect has ping tone. Remember, in Chinese rhyming schemes, the fundamental distinction is ping vs. ze (oblique). — kwami (talk) 22:50, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

꜂꜄꜀꜆꜁꜃꜇

The four tones of Chinese

꜂上 shǎng	去꜄  qù
꜀平  píng	入꜆  ru(p)

I'm looking for dictionaries where these diacritics are used, as I haven't seen any yet. --JWB (talk) 19:40, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

I've seen them plenty of times, but don't have access to anything right now.

My Japanese kanji dictionary does something very similar: they put a box around the rhyme, and fill in the corresponding corner. Same convention, different format.

And the other day I saw a photo online, where s.o. had drawn them on their fingers, using the orientation of the table at right. Now I can't find it. [here's a similar one] — kwami (talk) 22:48, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary uses them, except for ru-sheng (already marked by the stop). Kanguole 02:12, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

You're talking about use with romanization. (Pulleyblank's MC reconstructions quoted in this article use them as well, and Williams quoted below used them for Cantonese.) I think JWB was asking about use with Chinese script. — kwami (talk) 04:12, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey, I found an old book which describes the historical relationship between the diacritics in Chinese and Latin script: Williams (1842) Easy lessons in Chinese, or, Progressive exercises to facilitate the study of that language, especially adapted to the Canton dialect: [1]

pp 50–51: A Chinese schoolmaster usually marks the tone of every character in the classical books which he puts into the hands of his pupil, but in printed books they are never marked, except in a few cases to prevent doubt, where the same character has two different tones and corresponding different significations. Thus, shik 食 means to eat; but when marked 食꜄, it is read tsz', and means to nourish or feed.

The Chinese illustrate the modulation of the tones by the following diagram, which also shows their mode of marking them at the four corners of the character. [added the diagram to this article]

pp 54–55: In the Chrestomathy, Jones' system of spelling is employed, which requires accents upon some of the vowels, thus preöccupying the top of the vowels, so that no marks for the tones can be placed without confusion. An attempt has been made in that work to imitate the Chinese mode, with an addition of a horizontal line underneath in order to distinguish between the upper and lower series [illustrated with the eight Chinese diacritics on Latin transliterations]

It makes sense that the underscore is a Western innovation, as it would hardly be needed in Chinese, where the initial distinguishes the two registers of the four tones. — kwami (talk) 04:01, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

What are these symbols? I can't view them, and I would imagine the average reader wouldn't be able to either. We should put up a notice that this page requires a certain font. Talu42 (talk) 21:15, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

numbers and accents

It would be very helpful to match the numbers of the tones to the diacritical marks used in romanization (even used in the article). I can guess that "level" is ã and "rising" is á, but I can't guess whether "leaving" is à or ǎ. (Is part of the problem that this computer doesn't render the marks in the corners used in Chinese?)

Also, the material on how four tones split into eight probably doesn't need to appear twice.

Finally, I have some idea of what the tones are, but I think it would help many people to have a simple explanation at the beginning instead of sending them to Tone_(linguistics). For instance, there could be an example of how words that differ only in tone have unrelated meanings. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 20:55, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I see that the numbers and accents are at Standard_Chinese_phonology#Tones. —JerryFriedman (Talk) 20:59, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Couple of comments

From the article:

They derive from the four phonemic tones of Middle Chinese, and are named even AKA level (平 píng), rising (上 shǎng), going AKA departing (去 qù), and entering AKA checked (入 rù)

• Use of "AKA" is a bit weird. [NOTE: I have changed this now]

• "level" and "rising" are obvious, but at this point a very brief or simple explanation of "going" and "entering" is needed.

• I thought that the diacritic marks basically showed tone changes visually, so í would be rising, for example. However, they don't match. For example, píng is "level". This is confusing.

86.167.19.243 (talk) 17:49, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Requested move

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no general consensus to move to any of the titles proposed here. Dekimasuよ! 18:59, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

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Four tones (Chinese) → Four tones – Please place your rationale for the proposed move here. Timmyshin (talk) 02:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• Question - User:Timmyshin is Mandarin the only language with 4 tones? What are the other meanings of "four tones" in Google Books? In ictu oculi (talk) 02:50, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• In ictu oculi. No, as shown at: Four tones (Chinese)#Distribution in modern Chinese.

Comment: I find "Four tones" to lack description but it could be worse. The parallel article (zh:四聲) in Chinese is just called "tones". I'd still argue that some tones of what information in English would be useful. See: Four-Corner Method (called "four numbers" in Chinese) and others at title=Special%3AAllPages&from=Four

I see no problem with Four tones (Chinese) though something like Four tones, Chinese phonology might also work. Gregkaye ✍♪ 06:40, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• Let's cut the numerology: Tones in Chinese. Voice of reason 2 (talk) 09:55, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• Support Tones in Chinese as Voice of reason 2. Gregkaye ✍♪ 15:59, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

• Comment: this article is about traditional tone classes in Middle Chinese, not modern Mandarin, so I oppose titles such as Tones in Chinese. Although modern Mandarin also has four tones, they're different from the traditional tones. I'm not sure what's the best way to handle the situation. Maybe Kanguole and other users familiar with historical Chinese linguistics can comment? User talk:Zanhe
  • In that case, tones in Middle Chinese (28 gbook results) or Archaic Chinese tones (7 results). Voice of reason 2 (talk) 01:05, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

• I am agnostic on the original proposal but oppose tones in Chinese as going beyond the scope of this article (see User:Zanhe's comment above). What about four tone classes, four tone classes in Chinese, or Chinese four tone classes? —  AjaxSmack  02:05, 24 September 2014 (UTC)
  • I fail to see the advantage of any of these proposals. None of them distinguish between Mandarin and Tang dynasty Chinese, and they all retain a Chinglish emphasis on the number "four." Voice of reason 2 (talk) 03:13, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

• Tones in Middle Chinese? Tones in XXX? Gregkaye ✍♪ 07:52, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

• My suggestion of "four" was not spurred from the Chinese usage, but if it troublesome, how about Chinese tone classes or tone classes in Chinese? I oppose the use of "Middle Chinese" as too limiting; the tone classes have modern relevance and languages such as Hokkien still use them to delineate tones. I prefer to add the word "classes" because the article is not about the (four or more) tones of modern Chinese languages but how the tone classes that arose in Middle Chinese are realized in them. —  AjaxSmack  10:29, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

I checked both of these phrases on GBooks and found a few examples. But they are about modern Chinese tones; I didn't find anything that would support this usage. Voice of reason 2 (talk) 23:38, 26 September 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose tones in Chinese this article is not about tones in Chinese. Several dialects have more than four tones. No opinion on the original proposal. -- 65.94.171.225 (talk) 04:04, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Needs verbal description of pitch changes

I speak no variety of Chinese and thus have no experience with the pitch changes to which the terminology refers. For the benefit of non-speakers like me, this article needs a verbal description of what happens to the speaker's vocal pitch over the course of a vowel's articulation with a given tone. Does "high" mean "high in the speaker's vocal register"? Does "rising" mean "rising in pitch as the vowel's articulation progresses"? Does "falling" mean "falling in pitch as the vowel's articulation progresses"? Is tone 3's symbol (what looks like an upside-down circumflex accent) a graphical depiction of the pitch change, and if so, is the beginning of the vowel's articulation high or middle, is the halfway point middle or low, and is the final part high or middle? If tone 3's symbol is not a physical depiction of the pitch change, what is a good verbal description of the pitch change? What on earth do "departing" and "entering" mean? Does "checked" mean "stopped midway," as in "checked swing" in baseball, "check valve," or "check" in the sense of repulsing a military attack or bringing it to a standstill? And what sort of pitch change is it that gets "checked" by a stop consonant in the fourth tone; that is, what sort of change starts to happen before the vowel's articulation is cut off by the stop consonant?

Right now, the article reads like the Chinese version of a lesson from a bad Arabic teacher who explains concepts only in relation to other in-universe concepts without any sort of link to background knowledge that English-speaking readers might already have, such that the student can never figure out what the forms actually signify or apply them for any sort of generative purpose. Of course, the Chinese educational system is notorious for emphasizing rote-and-regurgitate learning at the expense of conceptual links, so if the authors grew up or were educated there, their way of presenting things might not be their fault.

96.37.67.222 (talk) 11:46, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Update: I found something at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pinyin_Tone_Chart.svg; it would be nice to add explicit X (percent of way through vowel) and Y (pitch relative to speaker's overall speaking-pitch register) axes as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thai_tones.svg does for Thai vowels. The "Modern Chinese" section of this article needs such a picture.

96.37.67.222 (talk) 11:54, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

... And re: the "requested move" above, how about separate articles for "Tones in Mandarin"/"Mandarin tones," "Tones in Cantonese/"Cantonese tones," etc., with each article having this kind of verbal and/or graphical description of each of the tones in the subject language, placing links to each of them in a disambiguation headnote for this article?

96.37.67.222 (talk) 11:58, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

That tonal chart for Mandarin is actually pretty much how the tones are taught and understood to sound by speakers. The only thing that is confusing is tone three, which has creaky voice. If you are familiar with the much-maligned "glottal fry" phenomenon in English, that's a kind of creaky voice. But that's just Standard Chinese. There are different Mandarins - many of them - who have different archiphonemese for the four Mandarin tones. And Cantonese tones are an entirely different creature. It's kind of extremely specialised deep linguistic analysis to present anything but the standard tones taught to foreigners in standard Cantonese of HK and Standard Chinese. I could see if someone wanted to add information on tonal contours and quality (breathiness, creaky voice, stiff voice, etc.) to individual language pages, but that's way out of Wiki depth to discuss tones in any great depth. The subject is very specialised and is mostly unreadable charts. Tones are usually book-length discussion topics beyond "this is the basic contour". Anything else is just really specialised science. Ogress _smash! 18:25, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

Also the tone names "checked" etc. are their equivalents in Old and Middle Chinese. Analyses of Chinese tonemes often start by noting the origin of a tone: for example, the "checked" tone originally meant "all syllables that ended in a stop" like -k, -p, -t. They had their own "tone". Modern Mandarin has lost final stops other than two nasals (-n, -ng) and therefore the checked tone has shifted to being a "real" tone with contour. (Actually I think the descendants of "checked" tones were assigned randomly to the other tone categories in Standard Mandarin, but I can't remember exactly.) So that's another whole level of explanation to have. Cantonese split the four classical tones into eight and then collapsed them into a fewer number depending on dialect. It's kind of like how Germanic t became High German z, English t, etc. Ogress _smash! 18:30, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

History of tone classification by native Chinese philologists

Under Checked tone#History, we find, among other things:

The first Chinese philologists began to describe the phonology of Chinese during the Early Middle Chinese period (specifically, during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, between 400 to 600 AD), under the influence of Buddhism and the Sanskrit language that arrived along with it. There were several unsuccessful attempts to classify the tones of Chinese before the establishment of the traditional four-tone description between 483 and 493. It is based on the Vedic theory of three intonations (聲明論). The middle intonation, udātta, maps to the "level tone" (平聲); the upwards intonation, svarita, to the "rising tone" (上聲); the downward intonation, anudātta, to the "departing tone" (去聲). The distinctive sound of syllables ending with a stop did not fit the three intonations and was categorised as the "entering tone" (入聲). The use of four-tone system flourished in the Sui and Tang dynasties (7th–10th centuries). An important rime dictionary, Qieyun, was written in this period.

Shouldn't this information, along with some of the other information in that section, be in this article, too? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:15, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

Name

I'm not saying Ajax's objections above are badly taken, but the WP:SCOPE of the present article seems to be focused on Middle Chinese and its legacy and I parked it here. I'm open to moving it to anywhere thoroughly distinguished from general discussion of Chinese tones. Four tones (traditional) may address his concerns. However, this article—in its present state—should NEVER be parked at anything general such as four tones (Chinese), where the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC by an unspeakably wide margin is the four tones of Standard Mandarin, currently spoken by a billion plus people, and not its historical forebear spoken by no one.

Frankly, not only is this not the PRIMARYTOPIC, I don't even think this article merits a disambiguation page at four tones: it should just point at Standard Mandarin. — LlywelynII 07:00, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Guangzhou and Hong Kong

I strongly condone the recent split. Different values are simply based on different perceptions of authors. It's like looking up the same word in two dictionaries. Unless the source exclusively deals with regional differences between the two cities, it should be removed. --94.217.102.134 (talk) 20:55, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Southern Min entering tone phonemic status

I understand the reasoning for a language like Cantonese for example. But for Hokkien where the entering tones behave differently under tone sandhi can we really say they are phonemically distinct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Grizzzzz (talk • contribs) 08:02, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Can you explain which of the tones do you see as not being distinct? Do you see 陰入 and 陰去 the same, plus 陽入 and 陰平 the same? Please note that the checked tones are historically different (hence, diachronically distinct) as well as being very different under tone sandhi, so for most researchers it's definitely phonemically distinct, and those tones cannot subsumed under a archiphonemic tone. Michael Ly (talk) 10:38, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Sorry this is quite late but I meant if they are distinct not not distinct. So if they are distinct phonemes unlike in Cantonese, then the 8(6) or 7(6) things wouldn't make sense for Southern Min Grizzzzz (talk) 00:40, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

So phonetically, 陰入 (tone 4) may sound similar to the low falling 陰去 (tone 3). Likewise, 陽入 generally sounds the same as the high level 陰平. For example, 識 sik (tone 陰入) is low tone, which sounds a lot like 性 sìng (low falling tone). Similarly, the literary reading of 食 si̍t is high tone, similar to 新 sin (high level tone). This is not reflected in the diacritics of peh-oe-ji or tai-lo romanisations. These change in tone sandhi differently. Michael Ly (talk) 17:14, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Facilitate the table reading with characters as examples

Hello all, I'm studying phonetic correlations between Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Cantonese. This table is a treasure trove! Now, I see it is based on the syllable onset in MC pronunciation, which most readers might not know. Could we add just a line with typical characters as examples? If my reasoning is correct, these examples could be: 阴平：花，阳平son：人，阳平obs：平，阴上：考，阳上son：马，阳上obs：被，阴去ten：个，阴去asp：票，阳去son：外，阳去obs：大，阴入short：北，阴入long：八，阳入son：物，阳入obs：达。 Thanks ! Napish (talk) 13:24, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Done, let me know if it needs adjustment. Cheers :) --Napish (talk) 04:26, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Actual phonetic tone contours?

What are they supposed to have sounded like? I suppose it's somewhat obvious with the 'level' and the 'rising' ones, perhaps the 'checked' one can be imagined as neutral due to sheer lack of space, but what about the 'going' or 'departing' one? It is in no way intuitive what kind of contour this name is supposed to express.--79.100.149.219 (talk) 09:55, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Shēng types of tones?

The article makes no mention of what the description shēng means regarding tones - ru sheng, shang sheng etc.

What does it mean? Shibolet Nehrd (talk) 07:05, 28 July 2022 (UTC)