VIJAY BHATIA is Professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong. His main areas of research are applied genre analysis of academic and professional discourse, including legal, business, newspaper, advertising and other promotional genres; ESP theory and practice; simplification of legal and other public documents; cross-cultural and disciplinary variation in professional discourse. He has served on the editorial advisory board of English for Specific Purposes, RELC Journal and World Englishes. He has published in most of the major journals in applied linguistics, ESP and discourse analysis. His important overseas consultancies include: a UN Development Programme project on the use of English in meeting the needs of Business and Technology in Singapore ; and an ASEAN-New Zealand Project on the use of English in Business and Technology. He has also advised the Educational Testing Service at Princeton on the design of their test of English for International Business Communication.
His major publications include Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings (1993), Legal Discourse in a Multilingual and Multicultural Context : Arbitration in Europe (with C. N. Candlin and M. Gotti, 2003), Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts of Legislation: An International Perspective (with C. N. Candlin, J. Engberg and A. Trosborg, 2003), Words of Written Discourse (2004), Vagueness in Normative Texts (with M. Gotti, J. Engberg, and D. Heller, 2005), Exploration in Specialized Genres (with M. Gotti, 2006), Legal Discourse across Cultures and Systems (with C. N. Candlin, and J. Engberg, 2007) .
母音的共振峰中心 母音 IPA 共振峰 f1 共振峰 f2 u u 320 Hz 800 Hz o o 500 Hz 1000 Hz ɑ ɑ 700 Hz 1150 Hz a a 1000 Hz 1400 Hz ø ø 500 Hz 1500 Hz y y 320 Hz 1650 Hz æ ɛ 700 Hz 1800 Hz e e 500 Hz 2300 Hz i i 320 Hz 2500 Hz
母音的共振峰 母音 主要共振峰範圍 u 200–400 Hz o 400–600 Hz a 800–1200 Hz e 400–600 和 2200–2600 Hz i 200–400 和 3000–3500 Hz 歌手的共振峰 研究歌手的頻譜時，特別是男歌手的，發現在3000Hz附近有清楚的共振峰（在2800到3400Hz之間），而在平常說話或是沒受過訓練的歌手的頻譜中則沒有。這個現象就是使歌手從交響樂團中能突顯出來的原因。因為交響樂團的共振峰大約在500Hz附近，比3000Hz要低得多。歌唱訓練會特別發展這個共振峰，例如透過「voce di strega」（女巫的聲音）這個練習[6]，使聲道到的一部份成為共振器（resonator）。[7][8] 參見 • Praat • Vocoder • 線性預測編碼 • 人聲 參考資訊 1. ^ Titze, I.R. (1994). Principles of Voice Production, Prentice Hall, ISBN 978-0137178933. 2. ^ Ladefoged, Peter (2006) A Course in Phonetics (Fifth Edition), Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth, p. 188. ISBN 1-4130-2079-8 3. ^ Ladefoged, Peter (2001) Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Language, Maldern, MA: Blackwell, p. 40. ISBN 0-631-21412-7 4. ^ Deterding, David (1997) 'The Formants of Monophthong Vowels in Standard Southern British English Pronunciation', Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 27, pp. 47-55. 5. ^ Hayward, Katrina (2000) Experimental Phonetics, Harlow, UK: Pearson, p. 149. ISBN 0-582-29137-2 6. ^ Frisell, Anthony（2007）．Baritone Voice．Boston：Branden Books，84．ISBN 0-8283-2181-7． 7. ^ Vocal Ring, or The Singer's Formant．The National Center for Voice and Speech．於2008年4月7日查閱． 8. ^ Sundberg, Johan（1987）．The science of the singing voice．DeKalb, Ill：Northern Illinois University Press．ISBN 0-87580-542-6． 外部連結 • What are formants? • Formants for fun and profit • Formants and wah-wah pedals • What is a formant? 討論「formant」的三種不同意義 • Formant tuning by soprano singers 源自 University of New South Wales • The acoustics of harmonic or overtone singing 源自 the University of New South Wales • Materials for measuring and plotting vowel formants
5. Source parameters: fo= Fundamental frequency (pitch) in 0.1 hertz av=Amplitude of voicing in dB (0-87) ah=Amplitude of aspiration in dB (0-87) af= Amplitude of frication in dB (0-87) tl=Spectral tilt for voicing in dB (0-24)
Format Frequencies both for cascade and Parallel branches f8=English format frequency in Hz (4000-7500) f7=Seventh format frequency in Hz (4000-6500) f6= Sixth format frequency in Hz (1200-4999) f5= Fifth format frequency in Hz (1200-4999) f4= Fourth format frequency in Hz (1200-4999) f3= Third format frequency in Hz (1200-4999) f2= Second format frequency in Hz (550-3000) f1= First format frequency in Hz (200-1300)
Bandwidth for Cascade branch b8=Eighth format bandwidth in Hz (40-2000) b7= Seventh format bandwidth in Hz (40-2000) b6= Sixth format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000) b5= Fifth format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000) b4= Fourth format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000) b3= Third format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000) b2= Second format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000) b1= First format bandwidth in Hz (40-1000)
By pass for all the amplitude controls ab= Amplitude of bypass for all amplitude controls in dB (0-87)
Amplitude for Parallel branch a8f=Eighth format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a7f=Seventh format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a6f=Sixth format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a5f=Fifth format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a4f=Fourth format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a3f=Third format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a2f=Second format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87) a1f=First format parallel branch amplitude in dB (0-87)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic 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. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes.
A slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal. However, most Indo-European languages, which include the most widely spoken languages in the world today, are not tonal.
In the most familiar tonal language, Chinese, tones are distinguished by their shape (contour), most syllables carry their own tone, and many words are differentiated solely by tone. Furthermore, tone tends to play almost no grammatical role (the Jin language of Shanxi being a notable exception). In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, however, tones are distinguished by their relative level, words are longer, there are fewer minimal tone pairs, and a single tone may be carried by the entire word, rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often grammatical information, such as past versus present, "I" versus "you", or positive versus negative, is conveyed solely by tone.
Many languages use tone in a more limited way. Somali, for example, may only have one high tone per word. In Japanese, less than half of the words have drop in pitch; words contrast according to which syllable this drop follows. Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent, since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, the term "pitch accent" does not have a coherent definition.
Some of the Sino-Tibetan languages, including the numerically most important ones. Most forms of Chinese are strongly tonal (an exception being Shanghainese, where the system has collapsed to only a two-way contrast at the word level with some initial consonants, and no contrast at all with others); while some of the Tibetan languages, including the standard languages of Lhasa and Bhutan and Burmese, are more marginally tonal. However, Nepal Bhasa, the original language of Kathmandu, is non-tonal, as are several Tibetan dialects and many other Tibeto-Burman languages.
Many Afro-Asiatic languages in the Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic families have register-tone systems, such as Chadic Hausa. Many of the Omotic tone systems are quite complex. However, many other languages in these families, such as the Cushitic language Somali, have minimal tone.
Slightly more than half of the Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo, have simple register-tone systems (languages in California, Oregon and a few in Alaska excluded), but the languages that have tone fall into two groups that are mirror images of each other. That is, a word which has a high tone in one language will have a cognate with a low tone in another, and vice versa.
All Oto-Manguean languages are tonal. Most have register-tone systems, some contour systems. These are perhaps the most complex tone systems in America.
The vast majority of Austronesian languages are non-tonal, but a small number have developed tone. No tonal language has been reported from Australia. With other languages we simply don't know. For example, the Ket language has been described as having up to eight tones by some investigators, as having four tones by others, but by some as having no tone at all. In cases such as these, the classification of a language as tonal may depend on the researcher's interpretation of what tone is. For instance, the Burmese language has phonetic tone, but each of its three tones is accompanied by a distinctive phonation (creaky, murmured or plain vowels). It could be argued either that the tone is incidental to the phonation, in which case Burmese would not be phonemically tonal, or that the phonation is incidental to the tone, in which case it would be considered tonal. Something similar appears to be the case with Ket.
A famous example of tone in Ancient Greek comes from Aristophanes' Frogs, where (l. 304) Aristophanes mentions an instance at a performance of Euripides' play Orestes, where an actor pronounced galḗn' horō"I see calm waters" with so much empathy that it came out galên horō "I see a weasel".
Tone as a distinguishing feature
Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics, but this does not make them tone languages. In tone languages, tone is phonemic, and thus minimal pairs distinguished by tone exist in such languages.
Here is a minimal tone set from Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, here transcribed by diacritics over the vowels:
A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin <ā>)
A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin <á>)
A low tone which dips briefly before, if there is no following syllable, rising a high pitch: /à/ (pinyin <ǎ>)
A sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin <à>)
A neutral tone, sometimes indicated by a dot (·) in Pinyin, has no specific contour; its pitch depends on the tones of the preceding and following syllables. Mandarin speakers refer to this tone as the "light tone" (輕聲).
These tones combine with a syllable such as "ma" to produce different words. A minimal set based on "ma" are, in pinyin transcription,
māma "mother"
má "hemp"
mǎ "horse"
mà "scold"
ma (an interrogative particle)
These may be combined into the rather contrived sentence,
Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi.
Register tones and contour tones Tone systems fall into two broad patterns: Register tone systems and contour tone systems.
Most Chinese languages use contour tone systems, where the distinguishing feature of the tones are their shifts in pitch (that is, the pitch is a contour), such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. Most Bantu languages, on the other hand, have register tone systems, where the distinguishing feature is the relative difference between the pitches, such as high, mid, or low, rather than their shapes. In many register tone systems there is a default tone, usually low in a two-tone system or mid in a three-tone system, that is more common and less salient than other tones. There are also languages that combine register and contour tones, such as many Kru languages, where nouns are distinguished by contour tones and verbs by register. Others, such as Yoruba, have phonetic contours, but these can easily be analysed as sequences of register tones, with for example sequences of high–low /áà/ becoming falling [âː], and sequences of low–high /àá/ becoming rising [ǎː].
Register languages
The term "register", when not used in the phrase "register tone", commonly indicates vowel phonation combined with tone in a single phonological system. Burmese, for example, is a register language, where differences in pitch are so intertwined with vowel phonation that neither can be considered without the other.
Tone terracing and tone sandhi
Tones are realized as pitch only in a relative sense. 'High tone' and 'low tone' are only meaningful relative to the speaker's vocal range and in comparing one syllable to the next, rather than as a contrast of absolute pitch such as one finds in music. As a result, when one combines tone with sentence prosody, the absolute pitch of a high tone at the end of a prosodic unit may be lower than that of a low tone at the beginning of the unit, because of the universal tendency (in both tonal and non-tonal languages) for pitch to decrease with time in a process called downdrift.
Tones may affect each other just as consonants and vowels do. In many register-tone languages, low tones may cause a downstep in following high or mid tones; the effect is such that even while the low tones remain at the lower end of the speaker's vocal range (which is itself descending due to downdrift), the high tones drop incrementally like steps in a stairway or terraced rice fields, until finally the tones merge and the system has to be reset. This effect is called tone terracing.
Sometimes a tone may remain as the sole realization of a grammatical particle after the original consonant and vowel disappear, so it can only be heard by its effect on other tones. It may cause downstep, or it may combine with other tones to form contours. These are called floating tones.
In many contour-tone languages, one tone may affect the shape of an adjacent tone. The affected tone may become something new, a tone that only occurs in such situations, or it may be changed into a different existing tone. This is called tone sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, a dipping tone between two other tones is reduced to a simple low tone, which otherwise does not occur in Mandarin, whereas if two dipping tones occur in a row, the first becomes a rising tone, indistinguishable from other rising tones in the language. For example, the words 很[xɤn˨˩˦] 'very' and 好[xaʊ˨˩˦] 'good' produce the phrase 很好[xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦] 'very good'.
Word tones and syllable tones
Another difference between tonal languages is whether the tones apply independently to each syllable or to the word as a whole. In Cantonese, Thai, and to some extent the Kru languages, each syllable may have any tone, whereas in Shanghainese, the Scandinavian languages, and many Bantu languages, the contour of each tone operates at the word level. That is, a trisyllabic word in a three-tone syllable-tone language has many more tonal possibilities (3×3×3=27) than a monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive tones no matter how many syllables are in a word. Many languages described as having pitch accent are word-tone languages.
Tone sandhi is an intermediate situation, as tones are carried by individual syllables, but affect each other so that they are not independent of each other. For example, a number of Mandarin suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin) a "neutral" tone, which has no independent existence. If a syllable with a neutral tone is added to a syllable with a full tone, the pitch contour of the resulting word is entirely determined by that other syllable:
Realization of neutral tones in Mandarin
Tone in isolation
Tone pattern with
added 'neutral tone'
Example
Pinyin
English meaning
high ˥
˥.˨
玻璃
bōli
glass
rising ˧˥
˧˥.˧
伯伯
bóbo
uncle
dipping ˨˩˦
˨˩.˦
喇叭
lǎba
horn
falling ˥˩
˥˩.˩
兔子
tùzi
rabbit
After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like a mid register tone – the default tone in most register-tone languages. However, after a falling tone it takes on a low pitch; the contour tone remains on the first syllable, but the pitch of the second syllable matches where the contour leaves off. And after a low-dipping tone, the contour spreads to the second syllable: The contour remains the same (˨˩˦) whether the word has one syllable or two. In other words, the tone is now the property of the word, not the syllable. Shanghainese has taken this pattern to its extreme, as the pitches of all syllables are determined by the tone before them, so that only the tone of the initial syllable of a word is distinctive.
Tonal polarity
Languages with simple tone systems or pitch accent may have one or two syllables specified for tone, with the rest of the word taking a default tone. Such languages differ in which tone is marked and which is the default. In Navajo, for example, syllables have a low tone by default, while marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani, however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone.[2] There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables, whereas in Russian, stressed syllables have a lower pitch.
Phonetic notation
There are three main approaches to notating tones in phonetic descriptions of a language.
The easiest from a typological perspective is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned numerals, and each tone transcribed as a numeral or sequence of numerals. Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic, for example with high tone being assigned the numeral 1, 3, or 5, and so have not been adopted for the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Also simple for simple tone systems is a series of diacritics, such as <ó> for high tone and <ò> for low tone. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one work-around). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are <ő ó ō ò ȍ>. These may be combined to form contour tones, <ô ǒ o᷄ o᷅ o᷆ o᷇ o᷈ o᷉>, though font support is sparse. Sometimes a non-IPA vertical diacritic for a second, higher, mid tone is seen, , so that in a language with four level tones, they may be transcribed ó o̍ōò.
The most flexible system is that of tone letters, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. The are most commonly used for complex contour systems, as in Liberia and Southern China.
Africa
In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), usually a set of accent marks is used to mark tone. The most common phonetic set (which is also included in the International Phonetic Alphabet) is found below:
High tone
acute
á
Mid tone
macron
ā
Low tone
grave
à
Several variations are found. In many three tone languages, it is common to mark High and Low tone as indicated above, but to omit marking of the Mid tone, e.g., má (High), ma (Mid), mà (Low). Similarly, in some two tone languages, only one tone is marked explicitly.
With more complex tonal systems, such as in the Kru and Omotic languages, it is usual to indicate tone with numbers, with 1 for HIGH and 4 or 5 for LOW in Kru, but 1 for LOW and 5 for HIGH in Omotic. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.
Asia
In the Chinese tradition, numerals are assigned to various tones. For instance, Standard Mandarin has five tones, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones, and the neutral tone is left numberless. Chinese dialects are traditionally described in terms of eight tones (six tones, from the perspective of modern linguistics), though many dialects do not have all of them. Outside standard Mandarin, the numerals 1 to 8 are assigned to these tones based on their historical origin. In neither of these systems does the numeral have anything to do with the pitch values of the tones. Tone 5, for example, has drastically different realizations in different dialects.
More iconic systems are to use tone numbers, or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as 'Chao tone letters'. These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1, and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows (note that the tone letters will not display properly unless you have a compatible font installed):
Tones of Standard Mandarin
High tone
55
˥˥
(Tone 1)
Mid rising tone
35
˧˥
(Tone 2)
Low dipping tone
214
˨˩˦
(Tone 3)
High falling tone
51
˥˩
(Tone 4)
A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc.
Standard IPA notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising /ɔ̌/ and falling /ɔ̂/, are widely supported by IPA fonts, while several Chinese languages have more than one rising or falling tone. One common work-around is to retain standard IPA /ɔ̌/ and /ɔ̂/ for high-rising (/35/) and high-falling (/53/) tones, and to use the subscript diacritics /ɔ̗/ and /ɔ̖/ for low-rising (/13/) and low-falling (/31/) tones.
The Thai language has five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling. It uses an alphabetic writing system which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant.
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, and the 6 tones are marked by diacritics above or below a certain vowel of each syllable. In many words that end in diphthongs, however, exactly which vowel is marked is still debatable. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:
The Latin-based Hmong and Iu Mien alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the ˧ tone) is left unwritten, while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. This system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter typewriter without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but, unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.
The Japanese language does not have tone, but does have downstep, so that 雨 áme (rain), with a drop in pitch after the first syllable, is distinguished from あめ ame (candy), which has no drop.
The Americas
Several North American languages have tone, one of which is Oklahoma Cherokee, said to be the most musical of the Iroquoian languages[citation needed]. Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 23 rising and 32 falling).
In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for High tone and /5/ stands for Low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages, where /1/ may be Low tone and /3/ High tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use ‹j› or ‹h› after a vowel to indicate low tone.
A number of languages of South America are tonal. For example, the Pirahã language has three tones. The Ticuna language isolate is exceptional for having five level tones (the only other languages to have such a system are the Trique language and the Usila dialect of Chinantec (both Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico).
Europe
Both Swedish and Norwegian have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent, that only appears in words of two or more syllables. This differentiates some two-syllable words depending on their morphological structure. The two word tones are usually called accent 1 and accent 2 (or acute accent and grave accent), respectively. Limburgish is similar. For further explanation and examples, see the Swedish, Norwegian, and Limburgish language articles.
Practical orthographies
In practical alphabetic orthographies, a number of approaches are used. Diacritics are common, as in pinyin, though these tend to be omitted.[3]Thai uses a combination of redundant consonants and diacritics. Tone letters may also be used, for example in Hmong RPA and several minority languages in China. Or tone may simply be ignored. This is possible even for highly tonal languages: for example, the Chinese navy has successfully used toneless pinyin in government telegraph communications for decades, and likewise Chinese reporters abroad may file their stories in toneless pinyin. Dungan, a variety of Mandarin spoken in Central Asia, has had a written literature since 1927 in orthographies that do not indicate tone since.[3]Ndjuka, where tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: In the Congo, there have been complaints from readers that newspapers written in orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible.
Number of tones
Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language of Nigeria is described as distinguishing six surface tones. Since tone contours may involve up to two shifts in pitch, there are theoretically 5*5*5 = 125 distinct tones. However, the most that are used in a single language is a tenth of that number.
Several Kam-Sui languages of southern China have nine tones, including contour tones, assuming that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China.
Preliminary work on the Wobe language of Liberia and Ivory Coast and the Chatino languages of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones, but many linguists have expressed doubts, believing that many of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects.
Tonal Consonants
Tone is often carried by the syllable, so syllabic consonants such as nasals and trills may bear tone. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages.
Origin of tone
The origin of tones in East and Southeast Asia has been discovered by the linguist A.-G. Haudricourt: tones in languages such as Vietnamese or Chinese originate in earlier consonantal contrasts (the seminal references are two articles by Haudricourt, published in 1954 and 1961). It is by now well-established that Old Chinese did not have tone. On the other hand, the origin of tones in the Subsaharan domain remains unknown to this day: the reconstructed parent languages of present-day tonal Bantu languages are presumed to be tonal.
The historical origin of tone is called tonogenesis (a term coined by the linguist James A. Matisoff). Tone is frequently an areal rather than a genealogical feature: That is, a language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal, or if speakers of a tonal language shift to the language in question, and bring their tones with them. In other cases, tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly: The dialect of Cherokee in Oklahoma has tone, but the dialect in North Carolina does not, although they were only separated in 1838.
Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. (Such trace effects of disappeared sounds, which is not restricted to tone, have been nicknamed Cheshirisation, after the lingering smile of the disappearing Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.) In a non-tonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants do. This is usually a minor phonetic detail of voicing. However, if consonant voicing is subsequently lost, that incidental pitch difference may be left over to carry the distinction that the voicing had carried, and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic). We can see this historically in Panjabi: the Panjabi murmured (voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared, and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a high tone; if at the end, a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch so as not to interfere with the low and high tones, and so has become a tone of its own: mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Panjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked: The written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.
Similarly, final fricatives or other consonants may phonetically affect the pitch of preceding vowels, and if they then weaken to /h/ and finally disappear completely, the difference in pitch, now a true difference in tone, carries on in their stead. This was the case with the Chinese languages: Two of the three tones of Middle Chinese, the "rising" and "leaving" tones, arose as the Old Chinese final consonants /ʔ/ and /s/ → /h/ disappeared, while syllables that ended with neither of these consonants were interpreted as carrying the third tone, "even". Most dialects descending from Middle Chinese were further affected by a tone split, where each tone split in two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced: Vowels following an unvoiced consonant acquired a higher tone while those following a voiced consonant acquired a lower tone as the voiced consonants lost their distinctiveness.
The same changes affected many other languages in the same area, and at around the same time (AD 1000–1500). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai, Vietnamese, and the Lhasa dialect of Tibetan.
In general, voiced initial consonants lead to low tones, while vowels after aspirated consonants acquire a high tone. When final consonants are lost, a glottal stop tends to leave a preceding vowel with a high or rising tone (although glottalized vowels tend to be low tone, so if the glottal stop causes vowel glottalization, that will tend to leave behind a low vowel), whereas a final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as can be seen in the case of Burmese.
Tone arose in the Athabascan languages at least twice, in a patchwork of two systems. In some languages, such as Navajo, syllables with glottalized consonants (including glottal stops) in the syllable coda developed low tones, whereas in others, such as Slavey, they developed high tones, so that the two tonal systems are almost mirror images of each other. Syllables without glottalized codas developed the opposite tone—for example, high tone in Navajo and low tone in Slavey, due to contrast with the tone triggered by the glottalization. Other Athabascan languages, namely those in western Alaska (such as Koyukon) and the Pacific coast (such as Hupa), did not develop tone. Thus, the Proto-Athabascan word for "water" *tuː is toneless toː in Hupa, high-tone tó in Navajo, and low-tone tù in Slavey; while Proto-Athabascan *-ɢʊtʼ "knee" is toneless -ɢotʼ in Hupa, low-tone -ɡòd in Navajo, and high-tone -góʼ in Slavey. Kingston (2005) provides a phonetic explanation for the opposite development of tone based on the two different ways of producing glottalized consonants with either (a) tense voice on the preceding vowel, which tends to produce a high F0, or (b) creaky voice, which tends to produce a low F0. Languages with "stiff" glottalized consonants and tense voice developed high tone on the preceding vowel and those with "slack" glottalized consonants with creaky voice developed low tone.
The Bantu languages also have "mirror" tone systems, where the languages in the northwest corner of the Bantu area have the opposite tones of other Bantu languages.
Three Algonquian languages developed tone independently of each other and of neighboring languages: Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kickapoo. In Cheyenne, tone arose via vowel contraction; the long vowels of Proto-Algonquian contracted into high-pitched vowels in Cheyenne, while the short vowels became low-pitched. In Kickapoo, a vowel with a following [h] acquired a low tone, and this tone later extended to all vowels followed by a fricative.
Tone in English
English is not a tonal language, though intonation may become semi-lexicalized in common expressions such as "I'unno" (I don't know). Pitch also plays a role in distinguishing acronyms that might otherwise be mistaken for common words. For example, in the phrase "Nike asks that you play—Participate in the Lives of America's Youth",[4] the acronym play may be pronounced with a high tone to distinguish it from the verb 'play', which would also make sense in this context. However, the high tone is only required for disambiguation, and is therefore contrastive intonation rather than true tone.
Haudricourt, André-Georges. (1961). Bipartition et tripartition des systèmes de tons dans quelques langues d'Extrême-Orient. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 56: 163-180.
Hombert, Jean-Marie; Ohala, John J.; & Ewan, William G. (1979). Phonetic explanations for the development of tones. Language, 55, 37-58.
Hyman, Larry. 2007. There is no pitch-accent prototype. Paper presented at the 2007 LSA Meeting. Anaheim, CA.
Hyman, Larry. 2007. How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent. Berkeley, UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report: 654-685. Available online.
Kingston, John. (2005). The phonetics of Athabaskan tonogenesis. In S. Hargus & K. Rice (Eds.), Athabaskan prosody (pp. 137-184). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Maddieson, Ian. (1978). Universals of tone. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of human language: Phonology (Vol. 2). Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.
Michaud, Alexis. (2008). Tones and intonation: some current challenges. Proc. of 8th Int. Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP'08), Strasbourg, pp. 13-18. (Keynote lecture.) Available online.
Odden, David. (1995). Tone: African languages. In J. Goldsmith (Ed.), Handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Pike, Kenneth L. (1948). Tone languages: A technique for determining the number and type of pitch contrasts in a language, with studies in tonemic substitution and fusion. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. (Reprinted 1972, ISBN 0-472-08734-7).
Yip, Moira. (2002). Tone. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. ISBN 0-521-77314-8 (hbk), ISBN 0-521-77445-4 (pbk).
References
^ Tones change over time, but may retain their original spelling. The Thai spelling of the final word in the tongue-twister, <ไหม>, indicates a rising tone, but the word is now commonly pronounced with a high tone. Therefore a new spelling, มั้ย, is occasionally seen.
