Tone contour

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Tone contour is the how the pitch varies over a syllable for a tone in a tonal language. It is usually denoted by a string of two or three numbers, or an equivalent pictogram.

[edit] Chao's Tone Letters

For Chinese, which is a tonal language, the pronunciation of a syllable in a particular tone gives adds information that a listener fluent in that language can discern. For Mandarin Chinese, there are four basic tones.

A method for indicating the tone contour, usually attributed to Yuen Ren Chao, may be visualised as a stave of music of five horizontal lines, each representing a different pitch level. The pitch levels are numbered from 1 to 5, the lowest being 1 and the highest being 5.

The Standard Mandarin third tone has a tone contour /214/, showing a pitch that dips and then rises.

Examples of level tone contours are /11/, /22/, /33/, /44/ and /55/.

Falling tone contours include /51/, /31/, /53/, etc.

Rising tone contours include /13/, /35/, /15/, etc.

Some people write short tones with only one digit to emphasis the shortness. For example, a high-pitched short utterance would have a tone contour of /5/, whereas a long, level high tone would be /55/. These "abrupt tones" typically have either an unvoiced consonant or a glottal stop at the end which abruptly cuts off the vowel sound. However, other people prefer keeping the digit doubled to avoid confusion with the tone numbers.

[edit] Other usage

In the study of African and Meso-American languages, linguists also use numbers to denote pitches. However, in these cases, 1 usually denotes the highest pitch, while 5 denotes the lowest pitch. Readers should pay attention to the context of different linguistic traditions.