Tone letters are
letters
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech or none in the case of a silent letter; any of the symbols of an alphabet
* Letterform, the g ...
that represent the
tones of a language, most commonly in languages with
contour tones
A tone contour or contour tone is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Kh ...
.
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Chao tone letters (IPA)

A series of
iconic tone letters based on a
was devised by
Yuen Ren Chao
Yuen Ren Chao (Chinese: 趙元任; 3 November 189225 February 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao ...
in the 1920s by adding a reference stave to the existing convention of the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...
. The stave was adopted by the IPA as an option in 1989 and is now nearly universal. When the contours had been drawn without a staff, it was difficult to discern subtle distinction in pitch. Only nine or so of the possible tones were commonly distinguished: high, medium and low level, (or as dots rather than macrons for 'unaccented' tones); high rising and falling, ; low rising and falling, ; and peaking and dipping, , though more precise notation was found and the IPA specifically provided for mid rising and falling tones if needed. The Chao tone letters were originally
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...
, but are now taller to make distinctions in pitch more visible.
Combinations of the Chao tone letters form schematics of the
pitch contour
__NOTOC__
In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time. Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate t ...
of a tone, mapping the pitch in the letter space and ending in a vertical bar. For example, represents the mid-dipping pitch contour of the Chinese word for horse, / ''mǎ''. Single tone letters differentiate up to five pitch levels: 'extra high' or 'top', 'high', 'mid', 'low', and 'extra low' or 'bottom'. No language is known to depend on more than five levels of pitch.
These letters are most commonly written at the end of a syllable.
For example,
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 ...
has the following four tones in syllables spoken in isolation:
For languages that have simple
register tone
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), ...
s in basic morphemes, or on short vowels, single tone letters are used for these, and the tone letters combine as the tones themselves do to form contours. For example,
Yoruba has the three basic tones on short vowels and the six derived contour tones on long vowels, diphthongs and contractions. On the other hand, for languages that have basic contour tones, and among these are level tones, it's a common convention to use double tone letters for those level tones, and single tone letters for short
checked tone
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the western phonetic sense but rathe ...
s, as in
Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively ...
vs . The tones and are generally analyzed as being the same phoneme, and the distinction reflects traditional Chinese classification; it also derives from the convention of numerically writing for high level pitch vs for tone #5. Regardless, this is not an IPA convention.
Chao tone letters are sometimes written before the syllable, in accordance with writing stress and
downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.
Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...
before the syllable, and as had been done with the unstaffed letters in the IPA before 1989. For example, the following passage transcribes the prosody of
European Portuguese
European Portuguese (, ), also known as Lusitanian Portuguese () or as the Portuguese (language) of Portugal (), refers to the dialects of the Portuguese language spoken in Portugal. The word "European" was chosen to avoid the clash of "Portugues ...
using tone letters alongside stress,
upstep
In linguistics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Upstep is a much rarer phenomenon than its counterpart, down ...
, and downstep in the same position before the syllable:
:
:
The two systems may be combined, with prosodic pitch written before a word or syllable and lexical tone after a word or syllable, since in the Sinological tradition the tone letters following a syllable are always purely lexical and disregard prosody.
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s 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 be transcribed . (These diacritics conflict with the conventions of
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...
, which uses the pre-Kiel IPA diacritic conventions: , respectively)
Reversed Chao tone letters
Reversed Chao tone letters indicate
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 ...
, with the right-stem letters on the left for the underlying tone, and left-stem ('reversed') letters on the right for the surface tone. For example, the Mandarin phrase + > is transcribed:
:
Some transcribers use reversed tone letters to show that they apply to the following rather than the preceding syllable. For example,
Kyoto Japanese 'rain' may be transcribed,
:
rather than .
Reversed tone letters were adopted by the IPA in 1989, though they do not appear in the space-limited IPA chart.
The phonetic realization of
neutral tone
The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chos ...
s are sometimes indicated by replacing the horizontal stroke with a dot: . When combined with tone sandhi, the same letters may have the stem on the left: . This is an extension of the pre-Kiel IPA convention of a dot placed at various heights to indicate the pitch of a reduced tone.
Chao defined the pitch trace as indicating a 'toneme' when to the left of the stave, and as a 'tone value' when to the right. However, 'tone value' is not precisely defined, and in his examples may be phonemic. His illustrations use left- and right-facing tone letters as follows:
* English etc: different intonations of the response 'yes'
* Cantonese : a phonemic change in tone due to sandhi in a compound word
* Lhasa Tibetan > : the spread of an underlying peaking tone on ''kɑ'' across adjacent syllables
The Tibetan distinction is a phonemic-phonetic one; the Cantonese distinction is not.
Capital-letter abbreviations
An abstract representation of relatively simple tone is often indicated with capital letters: H 'high', M 'mid', and L 'low'. A falling tone is then HM, HL, ML or more generally F, and a rising tone LM, MH, LH or more generally R. These may be presented by themselves (e.g. a rule H + M → F, or a word tone such as LL
wo low-tone syllables, or in combination with a CV transcription (e.g. a high-tone syllable etc.).
Numerical values
Tone letters are often transliterated as digits, particularly in Asian and Mesoamerican tone languages. Until the spread of
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...
computer fonts starting in 2000–2001, tone letters were not practical for many applications. A numerical substitute has been 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 as "ma55", "ma35", "ma214", "ma51".
However, such numerical systems are ambiguous. In Asian languages such as Chinese, convention assigns the lowest pitch a 1 and the highest a 5. Conversely, in Africa the lowest pitch is assigned a 5 and the highest a 1, barring a few exceptional cases with six tone levels, which may have the opposite convention of 1 being low and 6 being high. In the case of Mesoamerican languages, the highest pitch may be 1 but the lowest depends on the number of contrastive pitch levels in the language being transcribed. For example, an
Otomanguean
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean () languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of th ...
language with three level tones may denote them as 1 (high ), 2 (mid ) and 3 (low ). (Three-tone systems occur in
Mixtecan,
Chinantecan and
Amuzgoan languages.) A reader accustomed to Chinese usage will misinterpret the Mixtec low tone as mid, and the high tone as low. In
Chatino, 0 is high and 4 is low. With some Omotic languages, 0 is low and 3 is high. Because Chao tone letters are iconic, and musical staves are internationally recognized as having high pitch at the top and low pitch at the bottom, tone letters do not suffer from this ambiguity.
Division of tone space
The
International Phonetic Association
The International Phonetic Association (IPA; , API) is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the International Phoneti ...
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.
[(International Phonetic Association 1999, p. 14)]
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
The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the ''fundamental'' (abbreviated as 0 or 1 ), is defined as the lowest frequency of a Periodic signal, periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch (music), pitch of a n ...
(f
0), by subtracting the tone with lowest f
0 from the tone with highest f
0, and dividing this space into four equal f
0 intervals. Tone letters are then chosen based on the f
0 tone contour
A tone contour or contour tone is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, K ...
s over this region.
This linear approach is systematic, but it does not always align the beginning and end of each tone with the proposed tone levels. Chao's earlier description of the tone levels is an exponential approach. Chao proposed five tone levels, where each level is spaced two
semitone
A semitone, also called a minor second, half step, or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically.
It is defined as the interval between ...
s apart.
A later description provides only one semitone between levels 1 and 2, and three semitones between levels 2 and 3.
This updated description may be a language-specific division of the tone space.
IPA tone letters in Unicode
In Unicode, the IPA tone letters are encoded as follows:
;Standard staved tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
;Reversed tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
These are combined in sequence for contour tones; a supporting
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...
font will join them automatically.
The dotted tone letters are:
;Dotted tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
;Reversed dotted tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
Many of the IPA staveless tone letters (or at least approximations of them, depending on the font) are available in Unicode:
;Default or high staveless tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
;Mid staveless tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
;Low staveless tone letters
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Non-IPA systems
Although the phrase "tone letter" generally refers to the Chao system in the context of the IPA, there are also orthographies with letters assigned to individual tones, which may also be called tone letters.
UPA
The
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
Finno-Ugric transcription (FUT) or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...
has marks resembling half brackets that indicate the beginning and end of high and low tone: , also ꜠ high-pitch stress, ꜡ low-pitch stress.
Chinese
Besides phonemic tone systems, Chinese is commonly transcribed with four to eight historical tone categories. A mark is placed at a corner of a syllable for its category.
: yin or default tones: ꜀píng, ꜂shǎng, qù꜄, ruʔ꜆
: yang tones: ꜁píng, ꜃shǎng, qù꜅, ruʔ꜇
When the yin–yang distinction is not needed, the yin tone marks are used.
See also
bopomofo
Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration, transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwa ...
.
Zhuang
In several systems,
tone number
Tone numbers are numerical digits used like letters to mark the tones of a language. The number is usually placed after a romanized syllable. Tone numbers are defined for a particular language, so they have little meaning between languages.
Othe ...
s are integrated into the orthography and so they are technically letters even though they continue to be called "numbers". However, in the case of
Zhuang, the 1957 Chinese orthography modified the digits to make them graphically distinct from digits used numerically. Two letters were adopted from
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
: and , replacing the similar-looking tone numbers and . In 1982, these were replaced with Latin letters, one of which, , now doubles as both a consonant letter for and a tone letter for mid tone.
Hmong and Unified Miao
The Hmong
Romanized Popular Alphabet
The Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) or Hmong RPA (also Roman Popular Alphabet), is a system of romanization for the various dialects of the Hmong language. Created in Laos between 1951 and 1953 by a group of missionaries and Hmong advisers, it ha ...
was devised in the early 1950s with Latin tone letters. Two of the 'tones' are more accurately called
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), ...
, as tone is not their distinguishing feature. Several of the letters pull double duty representing consonants.
(The low-rising creaky register is a phrase-final allophone of the low-falling register.)
A unified Miao alphabet used in China applies a different scheme:
Chatino
In
Highland Chatino, superscript capital A–L, , indicate pan-dialectical tone-cognate sets. The pronunciation will vary across dialects, and certain tones will be pronounced the same in some dialects but different in others, due to
tone splits and conflations. Superscript capital M and S are used for
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 ...
.
Chinantec
Several ways of transcribing Chinantec tone have been developed. Linguists typically use superscripted numbers or IPA.
Ozumacín Chinantec uses the following diacritics:
:.
Sample: ''Jnäꜘ Paaˊ naˉhña̱a̱nˊ la̱a̱nˈ apóstol kya̱a̱ꜗ Jesucristo läꜙ hyohˉ dsëꜗ Dio. Ko̱ˉjø̱hꜘ kya̱a̱hˊ Sóstene ø̱ø̱hꜗ jneˊ.''
Korean
In
hangul
The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...
and sometimes Romanized transcription, and are used for historical vowel length and pitch accent.
Lahu and Akha
The related
Lahu and
Akha use the following spacing diacritic marks, which occur at the end of a syllable. Mid tone is not marked:
Unicode N3140
/ref>
Sample: Ngaˬ˗ahˇ hawˬ maˬ mehꞈ nya si ...
Ethiopic
Ethiopic tone marks are printed at 1⁄4 scale in the line above each letter, analogous to ruby text
Ruby characters or rubi characters () are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Chinese ''hanzi'', Japanese ''kanji'', and Korea ...
. They are:
:᎐ ''yizet''
:᎑ ''deret''
:᎒ ''rikrik''
:᎓ ''short rikrik''
:᎔ ''difat''
:᎕ ''kenat''
:᎖ ''chiret''
:᎗ ''hidet''
:᎘ ''deret-hidet''
:᎙ ''kurt''
See also
* Tone (linguistics)#Phonetic notation
* Thai alphabet#Tone
* Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch (music), pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflection, inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic informat ...
* Tone contour
A tone contour or contour tone is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, K ...
* Tone number
Tone numbers are numerical digits used like letters to mark the tones of a language. The number is usually placed after a romanized syllable. Tone numbers are defined for a particular language, so they have little meaning between languages.
Othe ...
* Tone name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use.
Chinese
In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4. They are descended from but not identical to the historical four to ...
* Tone (disambiguation)
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
...
* Four tones (Middle Chinese)
The four tones of Chinese poetry and Varieties of Chinese, dialectology () are four traditional tone (linguistics), tone classes of Chinese language, Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of ton ...
for traditional Chinese notation
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
* (Ph.D. Dissertation)
*
*
*
{{Suprasegmentals
Phonology
Tone (linguistics)