The ten tones of Standard Mandarin

I already replied to that when Sebire said the same thing, above. Please see that discussion and add your thoughts there if you have something to say that didn't come to light there.

"Hap" with no tone? In modern Cantonese the words with stop consonants have three different tones (high, middle and low). Did that not exist in Middle Chinese, then?

Hi bababardwan

Exactly speaking, 入声 (entering tone) is not a tone, and it just means that a reading of a given character has a stop consonant, just like the “p” in 合 “hap”. “合” is pronounced as “he2” with second tone in modern Mandarin, but it was “hap” (with no tone) in Middle Chinese.

Here is another example. The character “动” (dong) has fourth tone (去声) in modern Mandarin, but in middle Chinese it had 上声, which corresponds to third tone in modern Chinese. This change is attributed to the fact that “动” had a voiced consonant in middle Chinese, although the “d” is a voiceless consonant now.

In short, the change of a consonant from “voiced” to “voiceless” caused the change of tone (except for 去声 in middle Chinese). Conversely speaking, the tone of characters that had a voiceless consonant in middle Chinese stayed unchanged.

Hi orangina

That’s right. In Chinese phonology, the first tone and second tone (in modern Mandarin) are called “阴平” and “阳平” respectively, although the second tone (阳平) is actually not “a perfect flat tone”. In middle Chinese (6th century ～ 9th century), the pitch of 阳平 tone was lower that that of 阴平 tone, because 阳平 was a tone for Chinese characters that had a voiced consonant, and 阴平 for characters that had a voiceless consonant. Modern Mandarin doesn’t have voiced consonants anymore.

changye,

thanks for all that mate.So are you saying the entering was just part of a "literal" translation and had nothing to do with "entering"? Did all 4th tones in Middle Chinese end with stop consonants then?

So, would first tone be 平声阴 and second tone be 平声阳 (or vise-versa?) Or is the correlation not that straight forward. Did second tone used to be flat also, but at a different pitch? So many things to ponder in this world.

Hi bababardwan

"Entering tone" is the literal translation of "入声", which is also called "stop consonant". There were three stop consonants in Middle Chinese, i.e. "p", "t", and "k", and they were located at the end of a reading of a Chinese character, just like "合" (hap) and "学" (hok).

Middle Chinese had four tones, i.e. 平声 (flat), 上声 (rising/or dipping), 去声 (falling), and 入声 (entering/stop consonant), and every tone was further divided in to two types, 阴 and 阳. Mandarin already lost 入声, but some southern dialects, Cantonese included, still preserve it.

P/S. In the case of "上声", the "上" is pronounced as "shang3", but not "shang4", exactly speaking.

P/S2. 平声 in Middle Chinese corresponds to first/second tones in modern Chinese, and 上声 to third tone, and 去声 to fourth tone.

changye,

What did they mean when they called fourth tone "entering" tone?

Hi chenjiapei

It's easy for Korean and Japanese guys to tell if a given Chinese character had 入声 (entering tone/stop consonant) in Middle Chinese. Let me take "学" (xue2) as an example.

Modern Chinese 学 （xue）

Middle Chinese 学 （hok）

Modern Korean 学 (hak, 학)

Modern Japanese 学 (gaku)

Middle Chinese had voiced consonants, and its tones were separated into two groups, namely 阴 and 阳, based on whether a character has a voiced consonant.

What's interesting is that modern Cantonese still preserve both 阴 tones and 阳 tones despite the fact that there is no voiced consonants used in Cantonese.

I heard the same thing before, but I can't tell the difference anyway, hehe.

Um, not a 100% sure, but I'm going to HK next week to do the visa thing (CPod to the rescue once again) and popping into a school near Shenzhen on the way back. I know in all schools in the mainland they have to teach in Mandarin, although the students in Guangdong seem equally competent in both in 普通话 and 广东话。

Another interesting anecdote - when I was in Shenzhen last, with my colleague from HK (who claims not to speak Mandarin) she was conversing in Cantonese (in Shenzhen) with people who were speaking Mandarin, and although they were speaking completely different dialects, they seemed to somehow make each other understood (apparently she can 'understand' Mandarin but not speak it). Occasionally, I'd step in with the odd clarification, having a basic knowledge of mandarin...I can't tell you how good that made me feel!

外国人,wow, that is amazing. Actually, that raises a question that perhaps you can answer. In Hong Kong, do they teach 'Cantonese' in school, not as a foreign language, but rather like we would have English class in primary school? I'm sure they wouldn't in Guangdong as it is part of Mainland China, and thus Mandarin would be supreme.

小飞， I think your teacher maybe right. I work with a native Cantonese speaker who told me, and I quote 'Cantonese doesn't have any tones'.

"Too short" sounds childlish, but basically people prefer concise Japanese. That said, it's very easy to write a loooooooong "never-ending" sentence in Japanese, hehe.

Hey Changye, what about Japanese? If one wants to sound smart in Japanese is 'short and concise' prefered, or is 'long and complicated' the better choice?

After all, Chinese was a kind of "koine" or pidgin language in ancient China, which was used as a common language for many ethnic groups in this large country, and this is one of the reasons that Chinese is not grammatically so complicated. "The more concise the better" is very true for Chinese.

Actually Simon, today another teacher told me that in Chinese the more concise the better. English has gravitated more in that direction, but as I am sure you are well aware, in the past, just like the Romans and the Greeks, the longer the sentence the better. I bet though, the discovery of the tones wasn't due to an in depth examination. It came about because some foreigner tried to say 马 and 妈 without the tones and the Chinese side insisted that they should sound different.

The obsession with classifying and examining language is a very old Western thing, going back to Greece and Rome and their grammarians. Probably because Ancient Greek and Latin both have horribly complex grammar, and the Romans in particular loved really long and complicated sentences. I'm guessing there was never such an obsession in China, so nobody really thought about the tones, just like they "weren't aware" of the fact that their language was a Subject-Verb-Object language.

Changye, my teacher told me that Chinese people didnt' even know there were tones in their language until foreigners pointed it out to them. To me it sounded like they were probably the Jesuits, but who knows. Anyway, you seem to be someone who would know something about this. If you do, please do ;).

Tones in Mandarin are also based on this system, though. Mandarin has kept some of the differences (aspirated vs. unaspirated, I think) that Cantonese has lost, and vice versa. They say Cantonese is closer to Middle Chinese than Mandarin is, though.

As someone who has recently taken up Cantonese (it'd be a shame to waste a great opportunity for immersion in Foshan) I can say that Cantonese has six tones at the moment (compared to Mandarin's five, not to the ten), but they seem to be reducing. They used to be seven some time ago, I think (the high falling tone has disappeared), and Macau already only has five.

Don't take any of this as coming from an authority, though.

I think there's a decent body of evidence that describe links between language and music. Certainly, it seems obvious to me that if you can't hear relative pitch changes easily, then you're going to struggle learning a tonal language. If you can't hear that you're playing your e.g. clarinet a little bit flat/sharp on certain notes, then you're not going to be a very good clarinettist. However, my own experience is that the ability to hear smaller and smaller pitch changes gets better and better with practise, or at least exposure. To what extent that is innate talent, I am not sure. Perhaps musical ability is a consequence of innate talent with language rather than the other way round.

Still, for me, a sentance in a tonal language is just a tune. If you can reproduce that, you're sorted(ish). Learn the music, not the tones. I say ish, because repdouction of those sounds is something else entirely. Moreover, you can mechanically move your tongue into the correct position to recreate a sound, but if you don't change where you resonate that sound, then I am still going to sound like an English person talking Chinese however precise my tongue movements are.

I've heard that claim a lot of times, but to my knowledge it's never been conclusively proven. There have been a study that said, I believe, that people who grew up with a heavily tonal mother tongue are more likely to have perfect pitch, so there might be a connection between language tones and musical ones, but I'm a bit skeptical towards any connection between musical ability and other aspects of pronounciation.

In my experience, good pronounciation is pretty much a talent. Some people have good pronounciation in all their foreign languages and others have bad pronounciation in all of them. And that pronounciation usually manifests itself right at the start of learning a language. Some people will get it straight away and others will never get it. Of course you can modify it with good pronounciation practice, but the baseline is innate, I suspect.

e.g. hearing live music on TV/radio, the sycophantic hosts will bang on about how wonderful it was, whilst you're sitting there thinking that either they can't sing because the whole performance was out of tune, or perhaps their monitors weren't working.

I wonder to what extent the ability to discern relative pitch is a learned skill or an innate talent. If I remember correctly, my friends and I that did a lot of music at school often had much better French accents than those that didn't. However, to a certain extent, it depends on your will to imitate. Pronunciation is one thing, accent is another.

Don't know. What does "easily" mean? I'm not tone deaf, and I don't have absolute pitch. Grading the area inbetween is quite difficult, unless you're regularily involved with music.

Out of interest Simon, can you easily hold a tune/hear if an instrument is out of tune?

If I give you a fake 50RMB bill, you'll most likely assume it's a real 50RMB bill (just pretend you're a clueless tourist). You've seen them before and you don't look closer. If I tell you to look closer, you still might not see the difference, at least not until you take a bill you're sure is a real one and comparing them carefully. If I point it out to you ("Feel Mao's hair"), you'll say "Oh, right" and then you'll be able to look at any 50RMB bill and see if it's a real one or one of those fakes.

It can be the same thing with pronounciation. You'll hear something that sounds like a "B" and you pronounce it as such. If someone says they're different, it might still be hard to see what the difference is. If someone says "The Pinyin 'B' is unvoiced" you might go "Oh, right" and then not have any problems. That has been my experience, for example with the Pinyin "B", which I pronounced as voiced until I read that it isn't.

Really? I don't have a problem hearing the difference. If you can't hear it, surely then if you point it out, you still can't hear it? I don't know. It's never been a problem for me. My problem is being able to hear the difference and still not physically being able to pronounce the word, e.g. 日。

Well, yes, you learn through mimicry. But we all know what the third tone should sound like, and if you're not aware of the half-tone, you might do yourself a disservice by pronouncing full third tones all the time. This sort of stuff is good because it tells you where to look. See for example hamshank's comment below. I think this is helpful to some people, but it should of course not be a basis for producing or practicing the sounds. That basis should always be mimicry.

The simple "Listen. Repeat." approach has been responsible for some terrible accents in the past, mostly because a difference you can't hear is a difference you can't pronounce. That's where you get people who think that the Pinyin 'B' is the same as the English 'B' and pronounce it accordingly. They don't know that there's a difference and thus fall back on old speech patterns. Telling them that there is in fact a difference might sort that out. That's how it was for me, anyway.

of course not 27 tones but who cares.

..evoking 27 tones from the recipient..hmm,very instructive

Chuck Norris could remember all those tones and still kick you 27 times.

My guess is 27

thanks for that.It seems to refer to these as allotones.

Well, the Wikipedia page on Standard Madarin discusses the four neutral tones and the half third. It doesn't cover the half fourth, though. I got that from this webpage.