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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, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accents or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation (linguistics), intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from Pitch-accent language, pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qiyang Dialect
The Qiyang dialect () is a dialect of Xiang Chinese spoken in Qiyang County, Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to ... province. Tones The Qiyang dialect is quite unusual in that it is reported to have two "double contour" tones, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high fall – low fall and low fall – high fall: the entering tones ''yin qu'' (陰去) (4232) and ''yang qu'' (陽去) (2142). However, phonetically the pitch of a syllable depends on the voicing of the initial consonant, so these are phonemically a single tone. Moreover, the final fall of the ''yin qu'' tone is "not perceptually relevant", so it may be that 'dipping' (for ''yin qu'') and 'peaking' (for ''yang qu'') are a sufficient categorization. References *Wei Hu, 2011.Production and P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use. *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'' (), ''rising'' (), ''departing'' (), and '' entering'' (), each split into ''yin'' () and ''yang'' () registers, and the categories of ''high'' and ''low'' syllables. * 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.Frankfurter, Oscar. Elements of Siamese grammar with appendices. American Presbyterian mission press, 190(Full text available on Google Books) The table shows an example of both the phoneme, phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA. See also *Tone ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contour (linguistics)
In phonetics, contour describes speech sounds that behave as single segments but make an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another. Such sounds may be tones, vowels, or consonants. Many tone languages have contour tones, which move from one level to another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has four lexical tones. The high tone is level, without contour; the falling tone is a contour from high pitch to low; the rising tone a contour from mid pitch to high, and, when spoken in isolation, the low tone takes on a dipping contour, mid to low and then to high pitch. They are transcribed with series of either diacritics or tone letters, which with proper font support fuse into an iconic shape: . In the case of vowels, the terms diphthong and triphthong are used instead of 'contour'. They are vowels that glide from one place of articulation to another, as in English ''boy'' and ''bow.'' They are officially transcribed with a non-syllabic sign under one of the vowe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Literal Taiwanese
Modern Literal Taiwanese (MLT), also known as Modern Taiwanese Language (MTL), is an orthography in the Latin alphabet for Taiwanese based on the Taiwanese Modern Spelling System (TMSS). MLT is able to use the ASCII character set to indicate the proper variation of pitch without any subsidiary scripts or diacritic symbols. Phonology MLT Examples Universal Declaration of Human Rights MLT greetings The current system The MLT alphabet adopts the Latin alphabet of 26 letters and the Scandinavian letter ø to express the basic sounds of Taiwanese: :a b c ch e f g h i j k kh l m n ng ø o p ph q r s t th u v y z zh A MLT word, like each English word, can be formed by only one syllable or several syllables, with the two syllables being the most typical. Each syllable in MLT follows either one of the two underlying patterns (phonemes inside the bracket [] are optional): *[Consonant] + [front nasal-sound] + vowel + [tone indicator] *[Consonant] + vowel + [tone indicator] + [r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (), abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR. In addition a small number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong and overseas from 1942 to 2000. GR is the better known of the two romanization systems which indicate the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables ("tonal spelling"). These tones are fundamental to the Chinese language; their presence lets speakers discriminate between otherwise identical syllables and words. Other systems indicate the tones with either diacritics (for example Pinyin: ''āi, ái, ǎi'' and ''ài'') or numbers (Wade–Giles: ''ai1, ai2'', etc.). GR spells the four tones of the same vowel, ''ai'', ''air'', ''ae'' and ''ay''. These spellings, which follow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latinxua Sin Wenz
Latinxua Sin Wenz (; also known as Sin Wenz "New Script", Zhungguo Latinxua Sin Wenz "China Latinized New Script", Latinxua "Latinization") is a historical set of romanizations for Chinese languages, although references to Sin Wenz usually refer to Beifangxua Latinxua Sin Wenz, which was designed for Mandarin Chinese. Distinctively, Sin Wenz does not indicate tones, under the premise that the proper tones could be understood from context. Latinxua is historically notable as being the first romanization system used in place of Chinese characters by native Chinese speakers. It was originally developed by groups of Chinese and Russian scholars in the Soviet Union and used by Chinese expatriates there until the majority of them left Soviet Union. Later, it was revived for some time in Northern China where it was used in over 300 publications before its usage was ended by the People's Republic of China. History and development The work towards constructing the Beifangxua Latinxua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Letter
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones. __TOC__ Chao tone letters (IPA) A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s by adding a reference stave to the existing convention of the International Phonetic Alphabet. 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, but are now taller to make distinctions in pitch more visible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ◌́ ) and grave ( ◌̀ ), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Speech Communication Association
The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Purpose of the association The purpose is to promote the study and application of automatic speech processing (in the two directions: speech recognition and speech synthesis) with several sub-topics like speaker recognition or speech compression. The activity of the association concerns all aspects of speech processing, from the computational aspects to the linguistic aspects as well as the theorical aspects. Conferences ISCA organizes yearly the INTERSPEECH conference. Most recent INTERSPEECH: 2013Lyon * 2014 Singapore 2015Dresden 2016San Francisco 2017 Stockholm 2018Hyderabad 2019 Graz 2020Shanghai (fully virtual) 2021 Brno (hybrid) Forthcoming INTERSPEECH: 2022 Incheon 2023Dublin 2024Jerusalem ISCA board Current ISCA president i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prosodic Unit
In linguistics, a prosodic unit, often called an intonation unit or intonational phrase, is a segment of speech that occurs with a single prosodic contour ( pitch and rhythm contour). The abbreviation IU is used and therefore the full form is often found as ''intonation unit,'' despite the fact that technically it is a unit of prosody rather than intonation, which is only one element of prosody. Prosodic units occur at a hierarchy of levels, from the metrical foot and phonological word to a complete utterance. However, the term is generally restricted to intermediate levels which do not have a dedicated terminology. Prosodic units do not generally correspond to syntactic units, such as phrases and clauses; it is thought that they reflect different aspects of how the brain processes speech, with prosodic units being generated through on-line interaction and processing, and with morphosyntactic units being more automated. Defining characteristics Prosodic units are characteriz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Xiang
Old Xiang, also known as Lou-Shao (娄邵片 / 婁邵片), is a conservative Xiang Chinese language. It is spoken in the central areas of Hunan where it has been to some extent isolated from the neighboring Chinese languages, Southwestern Mandarin and Gan languages, and it retains the voiced plosives of Middle Chinese, which are otherwise only preserved in Wu languages like Shanghainese. See Shuangfeng dialect for details. Mao Zedong was a speaker of Old Xiang with his native Shaoshan dialect. Dialects and regions The Shuangfeng dialect The Shuangfeng dialect () is a dialect of Xiang Chinese, spoken in Shuangfeng County, Hunan province, China. Phonology Consonants Vowels Tones Phonemically, Shuangfeng dialect has three tones. Phonetically, however, the pitch of a syllable ... is representative. References Further reading * Xiang Chinese {{St-lang-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
