Tone name

In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use.

Pitch contours of the four Mandarin tones

• In contemporary standard Chinese (Mandarin), the tones are numbered from 1 to 4. They are descended from but not identical to the historical four tones of Middle Chinese, namely level (Chinese: 平; pinyin: píng), rising (Chinese: 上; pinyin: shǎng), departing (Chinese: 去; pinyin: qù), and entering (Chinese: 入; pinyin: rù), each split into yin (Chinese: 陰; pinyin: yīn) and yang (Chinese: 陽; pinyin: yáng) registers, and the categories of high and low syllables.

Northern Vietnamese (non-Hanoi) tones as uttered by a male speaker in isolation. From Nguyễn & Edmondson (1998)

• Standard Vietnamese has six tones, known as ngang, sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng tones.
• Thai has five phonemic tones: mid, low, falling, high and rising, sometimes referred to in older reference works as rectus, gravis, circumflexus, altus and demissus, respectively.^[1] The table shows an example of both the phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA.

Thai language tone chart

See also

• Tone letter
• Tone number
• Archaic & modern four tones in Chinese

References