Tone letter

Last updated
Register tones
˥˦˧˨˩
꜒꜓꜔꜕꜖
IPA Number 519–523
Entity (decimal)˥–˩
Encoding
Unicode (hex)U+02E5–U+02E9
Level tones
˥˧˩
˥˩
Long level-tone letters are commonly used for non-checked syllables and short letters for checked syllables, though this is not an IPA distinction.
Rising and falling tones [1]
˩˥˧˥˨˦˩˧˩˩˧
˥˩˥˧˦˨˧˩˥˥˧
Peaking and dipping tones [1]
˩˥˧˧˥˩˧˥˧˩˧˩
˥˩˧˧˩˥˥˧˥˧˩˧
˨˦˨˦˨˦˨˩˧꜔꜓꜕
Contour-tone letters are composed as sequences:
˥ ˧ → ˥˧,˧ ˩ ˧ → ˧˩˧

Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.

Contents

Chao tone letters (IPA)

The tone contours of Mandarin Chinese. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are , , , . Pinyin Tone Chart.svg
The tone contours of Mandarin Chinese. In the convention for Chinese, 1 is low and 5 is high. The corresponding tone letters are ˥,˧˥,˨˩˦,˥˩.

A series of iconic tone letters based on a musical staff was devised by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s [2] 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. [3] 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, [ˉa˗aˍa] (or as dots rather than macrons for 'unaccented' tones); high rising and falling, [ˊaˋa]; low rising and falling, [ˏaˎa]; and peaking and dipping, [ˆaˇa], though more precise notation was found and the IPA specifically provided for mid rising and falling tones if needed. [4] The Chao tone letters were originally x-height, but are now taller to make distinctions in pitch more visible.

Combinations of the Chao tone letters form schematics of the pitch contour of a tone, mapping the pitch in the letter space and ending in a vertical bar. For example, [ma˨˩˦] represents the mid-dipping pitch contour of the Chinese word for horse, 馬／马mǎ. Single tone letters differentiate up to five pitch levels: ˥ 'extra high' or 'top', ˦ 'high', ˧ 'mid', ˨ 'low', and ˩ 'extra low' or 'bottom'. No language is known to depend on more than five levels of pitch.

These letters are most commonly written at the end of a syllable. [5] [6] For example, Standard Mandarin has the following four tones in syllables spoken in isolation:

Tone
description		Tone
letter		Chao tone
numerals		Tone
number		PinyinTraditional
Chinese		Simplified
Chinese		Gloss
High levelma˥˥ma55ma1mā媽妈mother
Mid risingma˧˥ma35ma2má麻麻hemp
Low dippingma˨˩˦ma214ma3mǎ馬马horse
High fallingma˥˩ma51ma4mà罵骂scold

For languages that have simple register tones in basic morphemes, or on short vowels, single tone letters are used for these, and the tone letters combine as the tones themselves do to form contours. For example, Yoruba has the three basic tones [˥˧˩] on short vowels and the six derived contour tones [˥˧˥˩˧˥˧˩˩˧˩˥] on long vowels, diphthongs and contractions. On the other hand, for languages that have basic contour tones, and among these are level tones, it's a common convention to use double tone letters for those level tones, and single tone letters for short checked tones, as in Taiwanese Hokkien [sã˥˥] vs [tit˥]. The tones [˥˥] and [˥] are generally analyzed as being the same phoneme, and the distinction reflects traditional Chinese classification; it also derives from the convention of numerically writing ⟨sã55⟩ for high level pitch vs ⟨sã5⟩ for tone #5. Regardless, this is not an IPA convention.

Chao tone letters are sometimes written before the syllable, in accordance with writing stress and downstep before the syllable, and as had been done with the unstaffed letters in the IPA before 1989. For example, the following passage transcribes the prosody of European Portuguese using tone letters alongside stress, upstep, and downstep in the same position before the syllable: [7]

[uꜛˈvẽtuˈnɔɾtɯkumɯˈsoɐsuˈpɾaɾkõˈmũitɐ˩˧fuɾiɐ|mɐʃꜛˈku̯ɐ̃tumaiʃsu˩˧pɾavɐ|maizꜛuviɐꜜˈʒɐ̃tɯsiɐkõʃꜜˈɡavasuɐ˧˩kapɐ|ɐˈtɛꜛkiuˈvẽtuˈnɔɾtɯ˧˩d̥z̥ʃtiuǁ]
O vento norte começou a soprar com muita fúria, mas quanto mais soprava, mais o viajante se aconchegava à sua capa, até que o vento norte desistiu.

The two systems may be combined, with prosodic pitch written before a word or syllable and lexical tone after a word or syllable, since in the Sinological tradition the tone letters following a syllable are always purely lexical and disregard prosody.

Diacritics may also be used to transcribe tone in the IPA. For example, tone 3 in Mandarin is a low tone between other syllables, and can be represented as such phonemically. The four Mandarin tones can therefore be transcribed /má,mǎ,mà,mâ/. (These diacritics conflict with the conventions of Pinyin, which uses the pre-Kiel IPA diacritic conventions: ⟨mā, má, mǎ, mà⟩, respectively)

Reversed Chao tone letters

Reversed Chao tone letters indicate tone sandhi, with the right-stem letters on the left for the underlying tone, and left-stem ('reversed') letters on the right for the surface tone. For example, the Mandarin phrase nǐ/ni˨˩˦/ + hǎo/xaʊ˨˩˦/ > ní hǎo/ni˧˥xaʊ˨˩˦/ is transcribed:

⫽ni˨˩˦꜔꜒xaʊ˨˩˦⫽

Some transcribers use reversed tone letters to show that they apply to the following rather than the preceding syllable. For example, Kyoto Japanese ame 'rain' may be transcribed,

꜖a꜒꜔me

rather than a˩me˥˧. [8]

Reversed tone letters were adopted by the IPA in 1989, though they do not appear in the space-limited IPA chart. [9]

The phonetic realization of neutral tones are sometimes indicated by replacing the horizontal stroke with a dot: ⟨꜌ ꜋ ꜊ ꜉ ꜈⟩. When combined with tone sandhi, the same letters may have the stem on the left: ⟨꜑ ꜐ ꜏ ꜎ ꜍⟩. This is an extension of the pre-Kiel IPA convention of a dot placed at various heights to indicate the pitch of a reduced tone.

Chao defined the pitch trace as indicating a 'toneme' when to the left of the stave, and as a 'tone value' when to the right. However, 'tone value' is not precisely defined, and in his examples may be phonemic. His illustrations use left- and right-facing tone letters as follows:

The Tibetan distinction is a phonemic-phonetic one; the Cantonese distinction is not.

Capital-letter abbreviations

An abstract representation of relatively simple tone is often indicated with capital letters: H 'high', M 'mid', and L 'low'. A falling tone is then HM, HL, ML or more generally F, and a rising tone LM, MH, LH or more generally R. These may be presented by themselves (e.g. a rule H + M → F, or a word tone such as LL [two low-tone syllables]), or in combination with a CV transcription (e.g. a high-tone syllable /laH, laᴴ, Hla, ᴴla/ etc.).

Numerical values

Tone letters are often transliterated as digits, particularly in Asian and Mesoamerican tone languages. Until the spread of OpenType computer fonts starting in 2000–2001, tone letters were not practical for many applications. A numerical substitute has been commonly used for tone contours, with a numerical value assigned to the beginning, end, and sometimes middle of the contour. For example, the four Mandarin tones are commonly transcribed as "ma55", "ma35", "ma214", "ma51". [10]

However, such numerical systems are ambiguous. In Asian languages such as Chinese, convention assigns the lowest pitch a 1 and the highest a 5. Conversely, in Africa the lowest pitch is assigned a 5 and the highest a 1, barring a few exceptional cases with six tone levels, which may have the opposite convention of 1 being low and 6 being high. In the case of Mesoamerican languages, the highest pitch may be 1 but the lowest depends on the number of contrastive pitch levels in the language being transcribed. For example, an Otomanguean language with three level tones may denote them as 1 (high /˥/), 2 (mid /˧/) and 3 (low /˩/). (Three-tone systems occur in Mixtecan, Chinantecan and Amuzgoan languages.) A reader accustomed to Chinese usage will misinterpret the Mixtec low tone as mid, and the high tone as low. In Chatino, 0 is high and 4 is low. [11] With some Omotic languages, 0 is low and 3 is high. Because Chao tone letters are iconic, and musical staves are internationally recognized as having high pitch at the top and low pitch at the bottom, tone letters do not suffer from this ambiguity.

Comparison of Sinologist, Africanist and Mesoamericanist tone numerals
high-levelhigh-fallingmid-risingmid-levelmid-fallingmid-dippinglow-level
Tone letter˥˥˩˧˥˧˧˩˨˩˦˩
Asian convention555135333121411
African convention115313354535
American convention
(3 register tones)		113212232323
Chatino014202243424

Division of tone space

The International Phonetic Association suggests using the tone letters to represent phonemic contrasts. For example, if a language has a single falling tone, then it should be transcribed as /˥˩/, even if this tone does not fall across the entire pitch range. [12]

For the purposes of a precise linguistic analysis there are at least three approaches: linear, exponential, and language-specific. A linear approach is to map the tone levels directly to fundamental frequency (f0), by subtracting the tone with lowest f0 from the tone with highest f0, and dividing this space into four equal f0 intervals. Tone letters are then chosen based on the f0 tone contours over this region. [13] [14] This linear approach is systematic, but it does not always align the beginning and end of each tone with the proposed tone levels. [15] Chao's earlier description of the tone levels is an exponential approach. Chao proposed five tone levels, where each level is spaced two semitones apart. [5] A later description provides only one semitone between levels 1 and 2, and three semitones between levels 2 and 3. [6] This updated description may be a language-specific division of the tone space. [16] [ full citation needed ]

IPA tone letters in Unicode

In Unicode, the IPA tone letters are encoded as follows: [17]

Standard staved tone letters
Reversed tone letters

These are combined in sequence for contour tones; a supporting OpenType font will join them automatically.

The dotted tone letters are:

Dotted tone letters
Reversed dotted tone letters

Many of the IPA staveless tone letters (or at least approximations of them, depending on the font) are available in Unicode:

Default or high staveless tone letters
Mid staveless tone letters
Low staveless tone letters

Non-IPA systems

Although the phrase "tone letter" generally refers to the Chao system in the context of the IPA, there are also orthographies with letters assigned to individual tones, which may also be called tone letters.

UPA

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet has marks resembling half brackets that indicate the beginning and end of high and low tone: mid tone  ˹high tone˺  ˻low tone˼, also ꜠ high-pitch stress, ꜡ low-pitch stress.

Chinese

Besides phonemic tone systems, Chinese is commonly transcribed with four to eight historical tone categories. A mark is placed at a corner of a syllable for its category.

yin or default tones: ꜀píng, ꜂shǎng, qù꜄, ruʔ꜆
yang tones: ꜁píng, ꜃shǎng, qù꜅, ruʔ꜇

When the yin–yang distinction is not needed, the yin tone marks are used.

See also bopomofo.

Zhuang

In several systems, tone numbers are integrated into the orthography and so they are technically letters even though they continue to be called "numbers". However, in the case of Zhuang, the 1957 Chinese orthography modified the digits to make them graphically distinct from digits used numerically. Two letters were adopted from Cyrillic: ⟨з⟩ and ⟨ч⟩, replacing the similar-looking tone numbers ⟨3⟩ and ⟨4⟩. In 1982, these were replaced with Latin letters, one of which, ⟨h⟩, now doubles as both a consonant letter for /h/ and a tone letter for mid tone.

Zhuang tone letters
Tone
number 		Tone letter Pitch
number
1957 1982 IPA
1 ∅ ˨˦24
2 ƨz ˧˩31
3 зj ˥55
4 чx ˦˨42
5 ƽq ˧˥35
6 ƅh ˧33

Hmong and Unified Miao

The Hmong Romanized Popular Alphabet was devised in the early 1950s with Latin tone letters. Two of the 'tones' are more accurately called register, as tone is not their distinguishing feature. Several of the letters pull double duty representing consonants.

Hmong tone letters
Tone nameTone
letter		Example
Highbpob/pɔ́/ 'ball'
Mid∅po/pɔ/ 'spleen'
Lowspos/pɔ̀/ 'thorn'
High fallingjpoj/pɔ̂/ 'female'
Mid risingvpov/pɔ̌/ 'to throw'
Creaky (low falling)mpom/pɔ̰/ 'to see'
Creaky (low rising)dpod
Breathy (mid-low)gpog/pɔ̤/ 'grandmother'

(The low-rising creaky register is a phrase-final allophone of the low-falling register.)

A unified Miao alphabet used in China applies a different scheme:

Unified Miao
Tone numberTone letterIPA tone letter
Xong Hmu Hmong Diandongbei Miao
1b˧˥˧˦˧˦˧
2x˧˩˥˧˩˧˥
3d˦˧˥˥˥
4l˧˨˨˩˩
5t˥˧˦˦˧
6s˦˨˩˧˨˦˧˩
7k˦˥˧˧˩
8f˧˧˩˩˧˧˩

Chatino

In Highland Chatino, superscript capital A–L, ᴬ ᴮ ꟲ ᴰ ᴱ ꟳ ᴳ ᴴ ᴵ ᴶ ᴷ ᴸ, indicate pan-dialectical tone-cognate sets. The pronunciation will vary across dialects, and certain tones will be pronounced the same in some dialects but different in others, due to tone splits and conflations. Superscript capital M and S are used for tone sandhi.

Chinantec

Several ways of transcribing Chinantec tone have been developed. Linguists typically use superscripted numbers or IPA.

Ozumacín Chinantec uses the following diacritics:

⟨ˈ, ˉ, ˊ, ˋ, ꜗ, ꜘ, ꜙ, ꜚ⟩. [19]

Sample: Jnäꜘ Paaˊ naˉhña̱a̱nˊ la̱a̱nˈ apóstol kya̱a̱ꜗ Jesucristo läꜙ hyohˉ dsëꜗ Dio. Ko̱ˉjø̱hꜘ kya̱a̱hˊ Sóstene ø̱ø̱hꜗ jneˊ.

Korean

In hangul and sometimes Romanized transcription, ⟨〮⟩ and ⟨〯⟩ are used for historical vowel length and pitch accent.

Lahu and Akha

The related Lahu and Akha use the following spacing diacritic marks, which occur at the end of a syllable. Mid tone is not marked: [20] [21]

LetterAkha valueLahu value
midmid
ˇhighhigh falling
ˆmid glottalizedhigh checked
ˬlowlow falling
ꞈlow glottalizedlow checked
ˉhigh rising
ˍvery low

Sample: Ngaˬ˗ahˇ hawˬ maˬ mehꞈ nya si ...

Ethiopic

Ethiopic tone marks are printed at 1⁄4 scale in the line above each letter, analogous to ruby text. They are:

᎐ yizet
᎑ deret
᎒ rikrik
᎓ short rikrik
᎔ difat
᎕ kenat
᎖ chiret
᎗ hidet
᎘ deret-hidet
᎙ kurt

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 A great deal more combinations than these are possible. These examples are only slightly expanded from the limited set of ligatures suggested by Chao for broad phonetic notation, where mid-high and mid-low tones combine only with each other, and level does not combine with rising or falling.
  2. ↑ ( Chao 1930 )
  3. ↑ By default, IPA fonts display the Chao tone letters with the stave. However, SIL provides an option to omit it. See 'Hide tone contour staves' in the tunable feature settings of Gentium, Charis and Andika.
  4. ↑ A mid acute accent for mid-rising tone is not supported by Unicode as of 2021.
  5. 1 2 ( Chao 1956 )
  6. 1 2 ( Chao 1968 )
  7. ↑ "Portuguese (European)", IPA Handbook, 1999
  8. ↑ TIPA manual, 2004, v. 1.3, p. 19
  9. ↑ Report on the 1989 Kiel Convention. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 19.2 (December 1989)
  10. ↑ The Mandarin high tone is usually written as "ma55" instead of as "ma5" both to avoid confusion with tone number 5, and to show this is not an "abrupt" tone.
  11. ↑ Hilaria Cruz (2014) Linguistic poetics and rhetoric of Eastern Chatino of San Juan Quiahije. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
  12. ↑ (International Phonetic Association 1999, p. 14)
  13. ↑ ( Vance 1977 )
  14. ↑ ( Du 1988 )
  15. ↑ ( Cheng 1973 )
  16. ↑ ( Fon 2004 )
  17. ↑ Unicode chart Spacing Modifying Letters (U+02B0.., pdf)
  18. ↑ Staveless dots for unaccented (reduced) high, mid and low tones, as well as an example of a more complex staveless tone, are found in Yuen Ren Chao (1927) tʃaɪniːz (piˑkɪŋiːz). Le Maître Phonétique, 3rd series, vol. 5 (42), no. 20, pp. 45–46. JSTOR   44704218.
  19. ↑ Priest, Lorna A. (2004). Revised Proposal to Encode Chinantec Tone Marks. Retrieved 27 April 2019.
  20. ↑ Lorna Priest (2007) Marking Tone, SIL
  21. ↑ Unicode N3140

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diacritic</span> Modifier mark added to a letter

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. 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 ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Phonetic Alphabet</span> System of phonetic notation

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lepsius Standard Alphabet</span> Transcription system developed by Lepsius for Egyptian hieroglyphs and other African languages

The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien and extended it to write African languages, published in 1853, 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use.

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called 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.

The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin: circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Greek: περισπωμένη.

A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent languages also contrast with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

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 Asia, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sandawe language</span> Language isolate of central Tanzania

Sandawe is a language spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma Region of Tanzania. Sandawe's use of click consonants, a rare feature shared with only two other languages of East Africa – Hadza and Dahalo, had been the basis of its classification as a member of the defunct Khoisan family of Southern Africa since Albert Drexel in the 1920s. Recent investigations however suggest that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe family regardless of the validity of Khoisan as a whole. A discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).

The phonology of Vietnamese features 19 consonant phonemes, with 5 additional consonant phonemes used in Vietnamese's Southern dialect, and 4 exclusive to the Northern dialect. Vietnamese also has 14 vowel nuclei, and 6 tones that are integral to the interpretation of the language. Older interpretations of Vietnamese tones differentiated between "sharp" and "heavy" entering and departing tones. This article is a technical description of the sound system of the Vietnamese language, including phonetics and phonology. Two main varieties of Vietnamese, Hanoi and Saigon, which are slightly different to each other, are described below.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yi script</span> Script used to write Yi peoples language

The Yi scripts are two scripts used to write the Yi languages; Classical Yi, and the later Yi syllabary. The script is historically known in Chinese as Cuan Wen or Wei Shu and various other names (夷字、倮語、倮倮文、畢摩文), among them "tadpole writing" (蝌蚪文).

The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct – there is no official spoken standard, although it can be said that Eastern Norwegian Bokmål speech has an unofficial spoken standard, called Urban East Norwegian or Standard East Norwegian, loosely based on the speech of the literate classes of the Oslo area. This variant is the most common one taught to foreign students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the International Phonetic Alphabet</span> History of the IPA phonetic representation system

The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for pedagogical purposes. The Association was established in Paris in 1886 by French and British language teachers led by Paul Passy. The prototype of the alphabet appeared in Phonetic Teachers' Association (1888b). The Association based their alphabet upon the Romic alphabet of Henry Sweet, which in turn was based on the Phonotypic Alphabet of Isaac Pitman and the Palæotype of Alexander John Ellis.

Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notations through its existing scripts and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic characters are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.

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.

Taos is a Tanoan language spoken by several hundred people in New Mexico, in the United States. The main description of its phonology was contributed by George L. Trager in a (pre-generative) structuralist framework. Earlier considerations of the phonetics-phonology were by John P. Harrington and Jaime de Angulo. Trager's first account was in Trager (1946) based on fieldwork 1935-1937, which was then substantially revised in Trager (1948). The description below takes Trager (1946) as the main point of departure and notes where this differs from the analysis of Trager (1948). Harrington's description is more similar to Trager (1946). Certain comments from a generative perspective are noted in a comparative work Hale (1967).

The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to affect a standard accent. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese has a neutral tone that appears on weak syllables.

IPA Braille is the modern standard Braille encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), as recognized by the International Council on English Braille.

Latgalian language is a Latvian language dialect.

This article covers the phonology of the Kerkrade dialect, a West Ripuarian language variety spoken in parts of the Kerkrade municipality in the Netherlands and Herzogenrath in Germany.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.