Phonetic description of tone (1 hour)

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So far we have only discussed how to describe consonants phonetically. What about Chinese tones?

All the problems we saw for describing vowels and consonants (in the first activity of this module) also exist for describing tones. For many Chinese languages, the tones do have names or labels (such as "tone 1", "tone 2", etc., or the more classical labels like 阴平、阳平、上声、去声、 etc.). But these category labels cannot describe subtle differences in pronunciation. For example, think about the Mandarin pronunciation of 馬 when it's spoken by itself, vs. when it's spoken as the first syllable of a compount word (like 馬路). These are both "Tone 3", but many people pronounce them differently—when pronouncing 馬 by itself their pitch goes down and then back up, whereas when pronouncing it within the word 馬路 their pitch just goes down and doesn't rise again, like in this example:

So, just like for consonants and vowels, we also need a phonetic way to describe tone. Go through the activities below to learn how we can do that.

A common way of representing tones, especially among Chinese researchers, is the system called Chao letters, named after Yuen Ren Chao (趙元任). You use a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 represents the lowest pitch and 5 represents the highest pitch. Then, you describe any tone by describing its start and end pitch (and, if necessary, the middle pitch). For example, Tone 1 in Standard Mandarin (e.g. the tone of 收) is "55": it starts very high and it ends very high. Tone 2 (e.g., the tone of 熟) is 35: it starts medium, and then it rises and ends high. Tone 3 (e.g., the tone of 手) is 213: it starts kind of low, gets even lower, and then it rises up again.

(I don't know why they're called "Chao letters", since they're numbers, but whatever! I think the original version of this system used musical notes [like C, B, etc.] instead of numbers.)

Based on the above description, how would you represent Mandarin Tone 4 using Chao letters?

And what about 馬 when it's in front of another syllable (as in 馬路), discussed at the beginning of this activity; how would you represent that?

Describe the six tones of Cantonese (specifically, the variety of Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong) using Chao letters. If you speak Cantonese, you can try figuring them out on your own. If you don't speak Cantonese, you can ask a Cantonese-speaking friend to pronounce the tones for you, or you can look up examples online and listen to them.

(Note: some people say Cantonese has six tones, and some people say it has nine. The correct answer is six. To understand why, we'll need concepts from phonology, so we'll talk more about this in the Phonology module.)

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Phonetic description in signed languages".

Answers for Mandarin practice: Tone 4 is canonically '51'. 馬 in 馬路 is 21.

Answers for Cantonese: The canonical tones are 55 (分), 35 (e.g. 粉), 33 (e.g. 訓), 21 (e.g. 焚), 12 (e.g. 奮), and 22 (e.g. 份).



by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-04-18. CC-BY-4.0.