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Four Tones (Middle Chinese)
The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology () are four traditional tone classes of Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of tonal development in the modern varieties of Chinese, both in traditional Chinese and in Western linguistics. They correspond to the phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named ''even'' or ''level'' ( ''píng''), ''rising'' ( ''shǎng''), ''departing'' or ''going'' ( ''qù''), and ''entering'' or '' checked'' ( ''rù''). (The last three are collectively referred to as ''oblique'' (''zè''), an important concept in poetic tone patterns.) They were reconstructed as mid (˧ or 33), mid rising (˧˥ or 35), high falling (˥˩ or 51), and mid (˧ or 33) with a final stop consonant respectively. Due to historic splits and mergers, none of the modern varieties of Chinese have the exact four tones of Middle Chinese, but they are noted in rhyming dictionaries. Background According to the usual modern analysis, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modifier Tone Letters
Modifier Tone Letters is a Unicode block containing tone markings for Chinese, Chinantec, Africanist, and other phonetic transcriptions. It does not contain the standard IPA tone marks, which are found in Spacing Modifier Letters. are used to mark yin and (underlined) yang splits of the ping, shang, qu and ru tones, respectively, in the etymological four-tone analysis of Chinese. The dotted tone letters are used for the pitch of neutral tones, while the reversed tone letters and neutral are used for tone sandhi. are used in Ozumacín Chinantec. are the IPA diacritics for upstep and downstep, while are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some. can also be used for superscript modifiers. Block History The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Modifier Tone Letters block: See also * Phonetic symbols in Unicode Unicode supports several phonetic scri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transphonologization
In historical linguistics, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see below) is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contrast is preserved, yet becomes associated with a different feature Y. For example, a language contrasting two words * vs. * may evolve historically so that final consonants are dropped, yet the modern language preserves the contrast through the nature of the vowel, as in a pair vs. . Such a situation would be described by saying that a former contrast between oral and nasal consonants has been ''transphonologized'' into a contrast between oral vs. nasal vowels. The term ''transphonologization'' was coined by André-Georges Haudricourt. The concept was defined and amply illustrated by Hagège & Haudricourt; it has been mentioned by several followers of Panchronic phonology, and beyond. Transphonologization resulting in a new contrast on vow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese (). Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups; it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edwin G
The name Edwin means "rich friend". It comes from the Old English elements "ead" (rich, blessed) and "ƿine" (friend). The original Anglo-Saxon form is Eadƿine, which is also found for Anglo-Saxon figures. People * Edwin of Northumbria (died 632 or 633), King of Northumbria and Christian saint * Edwin (son of Edward the Elder) (died 933) * Eadwine of Sussex (died 982), King of Sussex * Eadwine of Abingdon (died 990), Abbot of Abingdon * Edwin, Earl of Mercia (died 1071), brother-in-law of Harold Godwinson (Harold II) *Edwin (director) (born 1978), Indonesian filmmaker * Edwin (musician) (born 1968), Canadian musician * Edwin Abeygunasekera, Sri Lankan Sinhala politician, member of the 1st and 2nd State Council of Ceylon * Edwin Ariyadasa (1922-2021), Sri Lankan Sinhala journalist * Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911) British artist * Edwin Eugene Aldrin (born 1930), although he changed it to Buzz Aldrin, American astronaut * Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890–1954), American in ... [...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] |
Late Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the more recently recovered preface of the ''Qieyun'', most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC). The ''fanqie'' method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century ''Yunjing'' and other rime tables incorpora ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comparative Method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal reconstruction in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages. The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The first linguist to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penang Hokkien
Penang Hokkien (; Tâi-lô: ''Pin-siânn Hok-kiàn-uā''; ; ) is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is spoken as a mother tongue by 63.9% of Penang's Chinese community, and also by some Penangite Indians and Penangite Malays as a third language spoken by these two other ethnic groups. It was once the ''lingua franca'' among the majority Chinese population in Penang, Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak. However, since the 1980s, many young speakers have shifted towards Malaysian Mandarin, under the Speak Mandarin Campaign in Chinese-medium schools in Malaysia, even though Mandarin was not previously spoken in these regions. Mandarin has been adopted as the only language of instruction in Chinese schools and, from the 1980s to mid-2010s, the schools had rules to penalize students and teachers for using non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese. Penang Hokkien is a subdialect of Zhangzhou (漳州; ''Tsiang-tsiu'') Chinese, with widespread use of Malay and Englis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jin Chinese
Jin (; ) is a proposed group of varieties of Chinese spoken by roughly 63 million people in northern China, including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it within Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related, but separate sister-group. Classification After the concept Mandarin Chinese was proposed, the Jinnish dialects were universally included within it, mainly because Chinese linguists paid little attention to these dialects at the time. In order to promote Standard Mandarin in the early days of People's Republic of China, linguists started to research various dialects in Shanxi, comparing these dialects with Standard Mandarin for helping the locals to learn it more quickly. During this period, a few linguists discovered some unique features of Jin Chinese that do not exist in other northern Mandarin dialects, planti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about 70%+ of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of Taiwanese people descended from immigrants of southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan. Taiwanese is generally similar to spoken Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, Quanzhou dialect, Quanzhou Hokkien, and Zhangzhou dialect, Zhangzhou Hokkien, as well as their dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, & Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible with Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien and Zhangzhou dialects, Zhangzhou Hokkien at the mouth of the Jiulong River (九龍) immediately to the west in mainland China and wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families ( comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allophonic
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''stop'' ) and the aspirated form (as in ''top'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Thai. On the other hand, in Spanish, (as in ''dolor'' ) and (as in ''nada'' ) are allophones for the phoneme , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English. The specific allophone selected in a given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants, but some allophones occur in free variation. Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
