Talk:Tone name

Name
Shouldn't this article be titled Chinese Tone Name? There are many tonal languages, not just Chinese. For example, Vietnamese has 6 tones, all of which are named. DHN 02:59, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have added a small section on Vietnamese tone names, and a description of their pitch qualities. Dylanwhs 07:36, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Other names
In World Braille Usage, UNESCO, 1990 (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0008/000872/087242eb.pdf), page 18 of the paper document, page 24 of the PDF file, I've seen other names for Chinese tones: 阴平, 阳平, 上声 and 去声. Are they in common use? Tohuvabohuo (talk) 13:25, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Middle Chinese tones and modern ones are different
Middle Chinese (MC) and modern Mandarin have both 4 tones. But they are different, though the tones in Mandarin indeed derive from MC. 阴平, 阳平, 上声, 去声 are tones in Putonghua (modern common Chinese), while 平 (Level tone), 上 (Rising tone), 去 (Departing tone), 入 (Entering tone) are tones in MC. Even among modern dialects, there are varied tones, different number, different tone level. For example, Cantonese has 9 different tones, some say 10. Generally speaking, 阴平 and 阳平 in Putonghua are splited from MC's 平, while 上 is derived from 上 and 去 from 去. But MC's 入声 (Entering) is devided into 4 parts and each becomes part of Putonghua's 阴平, 阳平, 上声 and 去声. 210.77.9.71 (talk) 13:35, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

About Cantonese tone names
While the traditional opinion is that Cantonese has 9 tones, some modern scholars disagree with it. For instance, the Chinese University of Hong Kong hosts a webpage called [http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/ Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations, Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect]. It's a database where you can search for a Chinese character and get its various Cantonese pronunciations, and vice versa. There, they use a pronunciation model that consists of initials, tones, and finals. The finals function like consonant endings of the pronunciations. Now, for practical purposes (e.g. not taking classical poems into account), some of the traditional 9 tones are differenciated only by the finals and do not otherwise sound different to native Cantonese speakers (e.g. myself). So once the finals have been eliminated from the consideration of the actual tone, we end up with only 6 tones, which are much more manageable than the 9 tones. SwordAngel (talk) 01:12, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Propose rename.
I propose that this article be named "Four tones" and that the Vietnamese section be split into another article or included into Vietnamese Tones. Translations of this article, including and especially the Chinese translation, talk about the four tones. 174.23.214.78 (talk) 17:30, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Translations are all over the place.
The German and Korean translations are about Standard Mandarin tones. The Japanese and Chinese ones are about the four tones, and the English and Serbian ones are about tone names. I have copied non-redundant content about Vietnamese from this article to Vietnamese alphabet. I will proceed to put most of the content about Chinese into the article four tones and link to four tones and Vietnamese alphabet from this article. After that, I will try to make translations correspond to each other. Asoer (talk) 03:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * There is now basically no content left in this article, and it cannot be expanded without overlapping with Four tones and Vietnamese alphabet, so it should now be deleted (i.e., emptied and redirected). It would have been better to move the Vietnamese information out and then rename this article to "Four tones" as suggested above, in order to preserve talk page continuity. It is not too late to do this. CapnPrep (talk) 00:23, 30 July 2010 (UTC)