A report on Tone (linguistics)
Use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words.
- Tone (linguistics)132 related topics with Alpha
Mandarin Chinese
13 linksGroup of Sinitic languages and dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China.
Group of Sinitic languages and dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China.
Most Mandarin varieties have four tones.
Varieties of Chinese
13 linksBranch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible.
Branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible.
All have phonemic tones, with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones.
Sino-Tibetan languages
15 linksFamily of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.
Family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.
Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone systems and some vocabulary with Chinese.
Chinese language
14 linksGroup of languages that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China.
Group of languages that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China.
All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.
Phoneme
10 linksUnit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
Unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
Besides segmental phonemes such as vowels and consonants, there are also suprasegmental features of pronunciation (such as tone and stress, syllable boundaries and other forms of juncture, nasalization and vowel harmony), which, in many languages, change the meaning of words and so are phonemic.
Vietnamese language
10 linksAustroasiatic language originating from Vietnam where it is the national and official language.
Austroasiatic language originating from Vietnam where it is the national and official language.
Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an analytic language with phonemic tone.
Pinyin
8 linksOfficial romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China, and to some extent, in Taiwan and Singapore.
Official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China, and to some extent, in Taiwan and Singapore.
The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters.
Thai language
8 linksTai language of the Kra–Dai language family spoken by the Central Thai people and a vast majority of Thai Chinese.
Tai language of the Kra–Dai language family spoken by the Central Thai people and a vast majority of Thai Chinese.
It is a tonal and analytic language, similar to Chinese and Vietnamese.
Tone sandhi
6 linksTone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes.
Syllable
12 linksUnit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).
Unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).
Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in tonal languages.