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Four Tones (Middle Chinese)
The four tones of Chinese poetry and Varieties of Chinese, dialectology () are four traditional tone (linguistics), tone classes of Chinese language, 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 historical Chinese phonology, phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named ''even'' or ''level'' ( ''píng''), ''rising'' ( ''shǎng''), ''departing'' or ''going'' ( ''qù''), and ''entering'' or ''checked tone, checked'' ( ''rù''). (The last three are collectively referred to as ''oblique'' (''zè''), an important concept in poetic tone patterns.) They are 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 Ch ...
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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 modifier letters used in Ozumacín Chinantec. are the IPA modifier letters for upstep and downstep, while are substitutes people used before broad font support of the IPA, and still preferred by some. 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 scripts and notation sys ...
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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 and 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. Resulting in a new contrast on vowels Umlaut A comm ...
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Edwin G
The name Edwin means "wealth-friend". It comes from (wealth, good fortune) and (friend). Thus the Old English form is Ēadwine, a name widely attested in early medieval England. Edwina is the feminine form of the name. Notable people and characters with the name include: Historical figures * 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), Ealdorman 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 Sandys (bishop) (1519–1588), Archbishop of York Modern era * E. W. Abeygunasekera, Sri Lankan Sinhala politician * Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926), English schoolmaster, theologian, and Anglican priest * Edwin Ariyadasa (1922–2021), Sri Lankan Sinhala journalist * Edwin Arrieta Arteaga (died 2023), Colombian murder victim * Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1 ...
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Tone Name
In tonal languages, tone names are the names given to the tones these languages use. Chinese 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. Vietnamese Standard Vietnamese has six tones, known as ngang, sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng tones. Thai 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 Phon ...
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Baxter's Transcription For Middle Chinese
William H. Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese is an alphabetic notation recording phonological information from medieval sources, rather than a reconstruction. It was introduced by Baxter as a reference point for his reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. Sources for Middle Chinese The centre of the study of Chinese historical phonology is the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary created by Lu Fayan in 601 CE as a guide to the proper reading of classic texts. The dictionary divided characters between the four tones, which were subdivided into 193 rhyme groups and then into homophone groups. The pronunciation of each homophone group is given by a fanqie formula, a pair of common characters respectively indicating the initial and final sounds of the syllable. Lu Fayan's work was very influential, and led to a series of expanded and corrected versions following the same structure. The most important of these was the '' Guangyun'' (1007–08), in which the number of rhyme gr ...
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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 Bernhard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the 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 incorporate a more sophisticate ...
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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 emerged in the early 19th century with the birth of Indo-European studies, then took a definite scientific approach with the works of the Neogrammarians in the late 19th� ...
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Penang Hokkien
Penang Hokkien ( zh, c=庇能福建話, tl=Pī-néeng Hok-kiàn-uā, poj=Pī-né͘ng Hok-kiàn-ōa; IPA: ) is a local variant of Hokkien spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is spoken natively by 63.9% of Penang's Chinese community, and also by some Penangite Indians and Penangite Malays. It was once the ''lingua franca'' among the majority Chinese population in Penang, Kedah, Perlis and northern Perak. However, since the 1980s, many younger 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, these schools penalised students and teachers for using non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese. A 2021 study found that Penang Hokkien was a 'threatened' language in the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, due to the encroachm ...
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Jin Chinese
Jin () is a group of Chinese linguistic varieties spoken by roughly 48 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 of Mandarin Chinese was proposed, the Jin 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, planting t ...
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Taiwanese Hokkien
Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by more than 70 percent of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of those Taiwanese people who are descended from Hoklo immigrants of Minnan region, southern Fujian. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan. Taiwanese is generally similar to Hokkien spoken in Amoy dialect, Amoy, Quanzhou dialect, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou dialect, Zhangzhou, as well as dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, and Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is mutually intelligible with the Amoy and Zhangzhou varieties at the mouth of the Jiulong River in mainland China, and with Philippine Hokkien to the south in the Philippines, spoken altogether by a ...
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Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families, ( comparative linguistics) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development. This field is grounded in the uniformitarian principle, which posits that the processes of language change observed today were also at work in the past, unless there is clear evidence to suggest otherwise. Historical linguists aim to describe and explain changes in individual languages, explore the history of speech communities, and study the origins and meanings of words ( etymology). Development Modern historical linguistics dates to the late 18th century, having originally grown o ...
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Allophonic
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive (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 Central Thai. Similarly, 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 (as in the difference between ''dare'' and ''there''). 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 n ...
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