Tone contour: Difference between revisions
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== Other usage == |
== Other usage == |
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In the study of African and Meso-American languages, linguists also use numbers to denote pitches. However, in these cases, 1 usually denotes the highest pitch, while 5 denotes the lowest pitch. Readers should pay attention to the context of different linguistic traditions. |
In the study of African and Meso-American languages, linguists also use numbers to denote pitches. However, in these cases, 1 usually denotes the highest pitch, while 5 denotes the lowest pitch. Readers should pay attention to the context of different linguistic traditions. |
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Revision as of 21:28, 30 November 2007
Tone contour is the how the pitch varies over a syllable for a tone in a tonal language. It is usually denoted by a string of two or three numbers, or an equivalent pictogram.
Chao's Tone Letters
A method for indicating the tone contour, usually attributed to Yuen Ren Chao, may be visualised as a stave of music of five horizontal lines, each representing a different pitch level (but remember: the tone contour phonetically never is a linear one (s. the publications of Lisa Schiefer, Christine Langmeier, Nora Wiedenmann (1988), with measurements by Nora Wiedenmann of the Amoy tones: about 17,000 segments of several native speakers of Amoy). The pitch levels are numbered from 1 to 5, the lowest being 1 and the highest being 5.
The Standard Mandarin third tone has a tone contour /214/, showing a pitch that dips and then rises.
Examples of level tone contours are /11/, /22/, /33/, /44/ and /55/.
Falling tone contours include /51/, /31/, /53/, etc.
Rising tone contours include /13/, /35/, /15/, etc.
Some people write short tones with only one digit to emphasise the shortness. For example, a high-pitched short utterance would have a tone contour of /5/, whereas a long, level high tone would be /55/. These "abrupt tones" typically have either an unvoiced consonant or a glottal stop at the end which abruptly cuts off the vowel sound. However, other authors prefer keeping the digit doubled to avoid confusion with the tone numbers.
Literature: I-Ping Wan, "On the phonological organization of Mandarin tones." In: Lingua, Vol. 117 (2007), No. 10, p. 1715-1738).
Other usage
In the study of African and Meso-American languages, linguists also use numbers to denote pitches. However, in these cases, 1 usually denotes the highest pitch, while 5 denotes the lowest pitch. Additionally, the number of pitch levels may be restricted to the number of contrastive levels in a given language, so a Mixtecan language with only three level tones will denote them with 1 (high), 2 (mid) and 3 (low). Readers should pay attention to the context of different linguistic traditions.
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