There are several approaches to notating tones in the description of a language. A fundamental difference is between
phonemic and
phonetic transcription. A phonemic notation will typically lack any consideration of the actual phonetic values of the tones. Such notations are especially common when comparing dialects with wildly different phonetic realizations of what are historically the same set of tones. In Chinese, for example, the "
four tones" may be assigned numbers, such as ① to ④ or – after the historical tone split that affected all Chinese languages to at least some extent – ① to ⑧ (with odd numbers for the
yin tones and even numbers for the
yang). In traditional Chinese notation, the equivalent diacritics are attached to the
Chinese character, marking the same distinctions, plus underlined for the
yang tones where a split has occurred. If further splits occurred in some language or dialect, the results may be numbered '4a' and '4b' or something similar. Among the
Kra-Dai languages, tones are typically assigned the letters A through D, or, after a historical tone split similar to what occurred in Chinese, A1 to D1 and A2 to D2; see
Proto-Tai language. With such a system, it can be seen which words in two languages have the same historical tone (say tone ③) even though they no longer sound anything alike. Also phonemic are
upstep and
downstep, which are indicated by the IPA diacritics and , respectively, or by the typographic substitutes and , respectively. Upstep and downstep affect the tones within a language as it is being spoken, typically due to grammatical inflection or when certain tones are brought together. (For example, a high tone may be stepped down when it occurs after a low tone, compared to the pitch it would have after a mid tone or another high tone.) Phonetic notation records the actual relative pitch of the tones. Since tones tend to vary over time periods as short as centuries, this means that the historical connections among the tones of two language varieties will generally be lost by such notation, even if they are dialects of the same language. • The easiest notation from a typographical perspective – but one that is internationally ambiguous – is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned digits and each tone transcribed as a digit (or as a sequence of digits if a contour tone). Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic (high tone may be assigned the digit 1, 3, or 5, for example) and have therefore not been adopted for the
International Phonetic Alphabet. For instance, high tone is conventionally written with a 1 and low tone with a 4 or 5 when transcribing the
Kru languages of Liberia, but with 1 for low and 5 for high for the
Omotic languages of Ethiopia. The tone in a Kru language is thus the same pitch contour as one written in an Omotic language. Pitch value 1 may be distinguished from tone number 1 by doubling it or making it superscript or both. • For simple tone systems, a series of diacritics such as for high tone and for low tone may be practical. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one workaround). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are , with doubled high and low diacritics for
extra high and
extra low (or 'top' and 'bottom'). The diacritics combine to form contour tones, of which have Unicode font support (support for additional combinations is sparse). Sometimes, a non-IPA vertical diacritic is seen for a second, higher mid tone, , so a language with four or six level tones may be transcribed or . For the
Chinantecan languages of Mexico, the diacritics have been used, but they are a local convention not accepted by the IPA. • A retired IPA system, sometimes still encountered, traces the
shape of the tone (the
pitch trace) before the syllable, where a stress mark would go. Thus level, rising, falling, peaking and dipping tones on [o] are ; these are read as high tones when contrasted with the low tones or with mid tones, which are poorly supported by Unicode (e.g. falling ). For a concrete example, when the diacritics are applied to the
Hanyu Pinyin syllable [sa] used in
Standard Chinese, it becomes easier to identify more specific rising and falling tones: (high peaking tone), (low level tone), etc. This system was used in combination with stress marks to indicate intonation as well, as in English (now transcribed ). • The most flexible system, based on the previous spacing diacritics but with the addition of a stem (like the staff of musical notation), is that of the IPA-adopted
Chao tone letters, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. Because musical staff notation is international, there is no international ambiguity with the Chao/IPA tone letters: a line at the top of the staff is high tone, a line at the bottom is low tone, and the shape of the line is a schematic of the contour of the tone (as visible in a
pitch trace). They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, such as those of the languages of Liberia and southern China. :The Chao tone letters have two variants. The left-stem letters, , are used for
tone sandhi. These are especially important for the
Min Chinese languages. For example, a word may be pronounced in isolation, but in a compound the tone will shift to . This can be notated morphophonemically as , where the back-to-front tone letters simultaneously show the underlying tone and the value in this word. Using the local (and internationally ambiguous) non-IPA numbering system, the compound may be written . Left-stem letters may also be combined to form contour tones. :The second Chao letter variant are the dotted tone letters , which are used to indicate the pitch of
neutral tones. These are phonemically null, and may be indicated with the digit '0' in a numbering system, but take specific pitches depending on the preceding phonemic tone. When combined with tone sandhi, the left-stem dotted tone letters are seen. An IPA/Chao tone letter will rarely be composed of more than three elements (which are sufficient for peaking and dipping tones). Occasionally, however, peaking–dipping and dipping–peaking tones, which require four elements – or even double-peaking and double-dipping tones, which require five – are encountered. This is usually only the case when
prosody is superposed on lexical or grammatical tone, but a good computer font will allow an indefinite number of tone letters to be concatenated. The IPA diacritics placed over vowels and other letters have not been extended to this level of complexity.
Africa In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), a set of diacritics is usual to mark tone. The most common are a subset of the
International Phonetic Alphabet: Minor variations are common. In many three-tone languages, it is usual to mark high and low tone as indicated above but to omit marking of the mid tone:
má (high),
ma (mid),
mà (low). Similarly, in two-tone languages, only one tone may be marked explicitly, usually the less common or more 'marked' tone (see
markedness). When digits are used, typically 1 is high and 5 is low, except in
Omotic languages, where 1 is low and 5 or 6 is high. In languages with just two tones, 1 may be high and 2 low, etc.
Asia In the Chinese tradition, digits are assigned to various tones (see
tone number). For instance,
Standard Mandarin Chinese, the official language of China, has four lexically contrastive tones, and the digits 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones. Syllables can sometimes be toneless and are described as having a neutral tone, typically indicated by omitting tone markings. Chinese varieties are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories
ping ('level'),
shang ('rising'),
qu ('exiting'),
ru ('entering'), based on the traditional analysis of
Middle Chinese (see
Four tones); note that these are not at all the same as the four tones of modern standard Mandarin Chinese. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called
yin and
yang. Typically, syllables carrying the
ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in Chinese varieties that have such coda(s) so in such dialects,
ru is not a tonal category in the sense used by Western linguistics but rather a category of syllable structures. Chinese phonologists perceived these
checked syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. In
Middle Chinese, when the tonal categories were established, the
shang and
qu tones also had characteristic final obstruents with concomitant tonic differences whereas syllables bearing the
ping tone ended in a simple sonorant. An alternative to using the Chinese category names is assigning to each category a digit ranging from 1 to 8, sometimes higher for some Southern Chinese dialects with additional tone splits. Syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the
varieties of Chinese even among dialects of the same group. For example, the
yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin Chinese but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin Chinese. More iconic systems 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 Chinese tones are transcribed as follows (the tone letters will not display properly without a
compatible font installed): A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc. The doubling of the number is commonly used with level tones to distinguish them from tone numbers; tone 3 in Mandarin Chinese, for example, is not mid /3/. However, it is not necessary with tone letters, so /33/ = or simply . If a distinction is made, it may be that is mid tone in a register system and is mid level tone in a contour system, or may be mid tone on a short syllable or a mid
checked tone, while is mid tone on a long syllable or a mid unchecked tone. IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising and falling , are widely supported by IPA fonts while several Chinese varieties have more than one rising or falling tone. One common workaround is to retain standard IPA and for high-rising (e.g. ) and high-falling (e.g. ) tones and to use the subscript diacritics and for low-rising (e.g. ) and low-falling (e.g. ) tones.
North America Several North American languages have tone, one of which is
Cherokee, an
Iroquoian language. Oklahoma Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 5 rising and 6 falling).
Ndjuka, in which tone is less important, ignores tone except for a negative marker. However, the reverse is also true: in South Africa and for the
Kasem language, there have been complaints that orthographies without tone marking are insufficiently legible. Standard Central
Thai has five tones–mid, low, falling, high and rising–often indicated respectively by the numbers zero, one, two, three and four. The
Thai alphabet is an
alphasyllabary, which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel length, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant. The
Shan alphabet, derived from the
Burmese script, has five tone letters: , , , , ; a sixth tone is unmarked.
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet and its six tones are marked by letters with
diacritics above or below a certain vowel. Basic 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. That system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter keyboard 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
Standard Zhuang and
Zhuang languages used to use a unique set of six "tone letters" based on the shapes of numbers, but slightly modified, to depict what tone a syllable was in. This was replaced in 1982 with the use of normal letters in the same manner, like Hmong. The syllabary of the
Nuosu language depicts tone in a unique manner, having separate glyphs for each tone other than for the mid-rising tone, which is denoted by the addition of a diacritic. Take the difference between ꉬ nge [ŋɯ³³], and ꉫ ngex [ŋɯ³⁴]. In romanisation, the letters t, x, and p are used to demarcate tone. As codas are forbidden in Nuosu there is no ambiguity. == Origin and development==