Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

changed tones (also called pinjam; ) occur when a word's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or grammatical context, while the base (or underlying) tone is usually the tone of the word when read in citation. It is thus distinct from

tone sandhi Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirec ...

, which are automatic modifications of tone created by their phonetic environment, without regard to meaning. In its most common form, it occurs on the final syllable of either a compound word, a reduplicated word, or certain vocative examples, especially in direct address to people such as family members. There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease. A changed tone usually takes the form of a non-high level, non-mid rising

tone Tone may refer to: Visual arts and color-related * Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory * Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color * Toning (coin), color change in coins * ...

(i.e. tones 3, 4, 5, and 6 in Jyutping and Yale; see

Cantonese phonology Standard Cantonese pronunciation originates from Guangzhou (also known as Canton) the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is closely related to the Guangzhou dialect, with only minor differences. Yue dialects spoken in other pa ...

for further information on the tones in Cantonese) transforming into a mid-rising tone (tone 2); for some speakers, this changed tone is slightly lower than the citation mid-rising tone. In other lexemes, the tone of the last syllable becomes a high level tone (tone 1 in Yale and Jyutping). This is especially true if the penultimate syllable already has tone 1 as its citation tone. For speakers with the high falling tone, this may also become the high level tone via the same process. In many speakers, another form of a changed tone used in specific vocatives that may also result in a high level tone (tone 1), rather than in a mid-level tone.Alan C. L. Yu (publ. pending) "Tonal Mapping in Cantonese Vocative Reduplication", ''Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society''. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Available online, accessed 4 November 2011

Taishanese Taishanese (), alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisanwa, is a Yue Chinese language native to Taishan, Guangdong. Even though they are related, Taishanese has little mutual i ...

also exhibits changed tones. It is realized in some cases as an additional high

floating tone A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes. An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language ...

to end of the mid level, low level, mid falling and low falling tones; this results in new contours for Taishanese, namely mid rising, low rising, mid dipping and low dipping respectively. The final pitch of these changed tones may be even higher in pitch than the citation high level tone. Another changed tone occurs where the expected tone is replaced by the low falling tone. These two are combined in certain cases, with the result that the expected tone is replaced by the low dipping tone, such as the change of the verb /tʃat˧/ "to brush" into the noun /tʃat˨˩˥/ "a brush".Teresa M. Cheng "The Phonology of Taishan", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May 1973), pp. 256-322.

The use of a high rising tone in marking changed tone in many Yue Chinese, Yue varieties of Chinese implies one possible origin in diminutive morphemes, much in the same way that

erhua ''Erhua'' (), also called "erization" or "rhotacization of syllable finals", is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the ''er'' (; ) sound to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. ''Erhuayin'' () is the pronunciation of "er" after r ...

functions in

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern Standard language, standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the Republic of ...

and in the

Beijing dialect The Beijing dialect ( zh, s=北京话, t=北京話, p=Běijīnghuà), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the ...

. In Cantonese, several diminutive morphemes have been proposed as the original one, among them /jiː˥/ "son" (in its high level tone form) and /t͡siː˧˥/ "child". Thus the changed tone is the relic of the contraction of the main syllable with this diminutive. A separate tone change that operates on verbs has also been attested, marking the

perfective aspect The perfective aspect ( abbreviated ), sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole, i.e., a unit without interior composition. The perfective aspect is distinguished from the ...

. This is phonetically equivalent to the tone change above in Hong Kong and Guangzhou Cantonese, including the modification for those with a high falling tone. This is believed to be the result of the merger of the perfective marker into the verb, and is thus also found in other Yue varieties, such as the dialect of Xiaolan in

Zhongshan Zhongshan ( zh, c=中山 ), alternately romanized via Cantonese as Chungshan, is a prefecture-level city in the south of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province, China. As of the 2020 census, the whole city with 4,418,060 inhabitants is n ...

; it is also found in

Hakka Chinese Hakka ( zh, c=, p=Kèjiāhuà; '' Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: '', zh, c=, p=Kèjiāyǔ; '' Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: '') forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China, Taiwan, some diaspora areas ...

varieties, such as some varieties in

Heyuan Heyuan ( zh, c=河源, j=ho4 jyun4, Hakka Chinese, Hakka: Fò-Ngiàn) is a prefecture-level city of Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. As of the 2020 census, its population was 2,837,686 whom 1,051,993 lived in the built-up ('' ...

in northern Guangdong, as well as in Shicheng and Yudu in southern

Jiangxi ; Gan: ) , translit_lang1_type2 = , translit_lang1_info2 = , translit_lang1_type3 = , translit_lang1_info3 = , image_map = Jiangxi in China (+all claims hatched).svg , mapsize = 275px , map_caption = Location ...

. This tone morpheme is even said to predominate over the overt perfective markers in certain areas such as

Zhaoqing Zhaoqing ( zh, c=肇庆), alternately romanized as Shiuhing, is a prefecture-level city in Guangdong Province, China. As of the 2020 census, its population was 4,113,594, with 1,553,109 living in the built-up (or metro) area made of Duanz ...

Xinhui Xinhui, alternately romanized as Sunwui and also known as Kuixiang, is an urban district of Jiangmen in Guangdong, China. It grew from a separate city founded at the confluence of the Tan and West Rivers. It has a population of about 735,50 ...

Foshan Foshan (, ; Chinese: 佛山) is a prefecture-level city in central Guangdong Province, China. The entire prefecture covers and had a population of 9,498,863 as of the 2020 census. The city is part of the western side of the Pearl River Delta m ...

and

Shunde Shunde (Shun Tak in Cantonese) is a district of the city of Foshan, Guangdong province, located in the Pearl River Delta. It had a population of 2,464,784 as of the 2010 census. Once a traditional agricultural county, it has become one of the mo ...

, giving rise to a form of tonal

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut ( , from German ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its relate ...

, although this is associated with the speech of the older generation.

Notes

References

* * {{cite journal , last = Yu , first = Alan C. L. , title = Understanding near mergers: The case of morphological tone in Cantonese , journal = Phonology , volume = 24 , issue = 1 , pages = 187–214 , year = 2007 , url = http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Eaclyu/papers/Phonology24.pdf , accessdate = 2007-12-05 , doi = 10.1017/S0952675707001157 Phonology