Reason or origins of tones?

I’ve now started to really study Chinese. I first stared out with some books that were not so interesting. Then I tried newspapers, going thru them character by character. Not so fun. Then I thought why not a book I like. If it’s a a novel, poem, or work you love, why not?

Now that I’m starting to study Chinese, a thought came to me. Why a word use this or that tone?

So I’m going thru a book and the first paragraph begins, zai4 yi1 qie4 shi2 dai4. Qie4 is a new word. I notice qie1 and qie4 (and dao2). I’m wondering why qie (or any other character) uses this or that tone. Why qie1 for cut and qie4 for corresponding to/be close to. It’s starting to seem like answer lies somewhere, perhaps around the desired effect of speech or wanted reaction.

Tones have the qualities of sound: being harsh, abrasive, musical, soothing… Could it be that a character’s chosen tone corresponds to its character?

I’m guessing there’s people that have studied this. How far it’s gone?

I’ve never looked it up, but I have this theory that the tones originated from the fact that Chinese only has single syllable characters. At the most they have 2 to 3 characters together to make a word, thus there biggest word is 2-3 syllable (3 seems pretty rare to me even names used to be only two). As language developed I assume, tones developed as a way to extend the language. In most languages the sky is the limit with syllables plus having a mad number of letter combinations (English for example, 4-5 syllable words are in no way uncommon). That was my theory, I have never made any effort to research it to confirm or deny it, it just kinda makes sense to me :slight_smile:. I could be so wrong, :idunno: .

From Wikipedia, on the origin of tones:

[quote]An interesting question is how tones arise in a language, i.e. tonogenesis. In the Chinese languages they arose as a reinterpretation of initial and final consonants. Middle Chinese, for example, had three tones (rising, “departing”, and level), which are said to have arisen from Old Chinese final consonants (/ʔ/, /s/, or neither of these). Most later dialects were affected by a tone split, where each tone split into two depending on whether the initial consonant was voiced or unvoiced; vowels following an unvoiced consonant acquired a high tone while those following a voiced consonant acquired a low tone, and this distinction became phonetic when voiced consonants lost their voicing.

These same changes affected many other languages in the same area, around the same time (1000 - 1500 AD). The tone split, for example, also occurred in Thai, Vietnamese, and Lhasa 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), whereas a final fricative tends to leave a preceding vowel with a low or falling tone. Vowel phonation also frequently develops into tone, as in the case of Burmese.[/quote]

Considering “po4-yin1-zi4” - characters that have more than one pronunciation - some differ only in tone, such as the OP’s example, also jiao1 (to teach) and jiao4 (religion, a teaching), and more. These can be compared to the English word “console” (verb) and “console” (noun) which have different stress, not to mention meaning.

Okay, and we have tire and tyre but these are not regular problems.

When they considered using the alphabet in China the idea had to be quietly dropped because you’d end up with something like 9 different meanings plus… for one word and tone.

Example

xiao1 peel/ sharpen.
xiao1 eliminate/ vanish
xiao1 night
xiao1 breathe heavily/ cry out loudly.
xiao1 free
xiao1 cancel/ spend
xiao1 desolate
xiao1 sound of rain beating down or howling wind.
xiao1 noisy din, haughty or proud.

This is just from my 3,000 word dictionary. There must be lots more.

I thought it might also relate to lack of ability to remember a bunch of syllables related to a character that can be recognised and verbalised in each and every instance as an alphabet style langauge can. (Some sort of human brain limit related to see it and speak it) I know non written langauges don’t have problems with multiple syllables and can be quite long.

I found some Egyptian to check this.

home.prcn.org/sfryer/Egyptian/Neni/Neni2.html

Seem to be 1, 2 or 3 syllable words but I did get bored looking around here.

=i 	my 			
=k 	your (m. sing.) 			
=f 	his 	
=sn 	their
=s 	her

[quote=“Ironman”]When they considered using the alphabet in China the idea had to be quietly dropped because you’d end up with something like 9 different meanings plus… for one word and tone.

Example

xiao1 peel/ sharpen.
xiao1 eliminate/ vanish
xiao1 night
xiao1 breathe heavily/ cry out loudly.
xiao1 free
xiao1 cancel/ spend
xiao1 desolate
xiao1 sound of rain beating down or howling wind.
xiao1 noisy din, haughty or proud.

This is just from my 3,000 word dictionary. There must be lots more.
[/quote]

I have to disagree with you on this one Ironman. If you look at the language from the point of view of characters, then there are indeed a lot of homonyms. However, from your examples above - people don’t say xiao1 and expect others to know what they mean. That’s why Mandarin has so many two-syllable words. Xiao1 is too ambiguous, granted, but qu3xiao1 (cancel) is not, and that is how the language is actually used, in reducing ambiguity. Once you take into account multi-syllable words, spoken Chinese has a few more homonyms than English as a percentage, but we’re in the same ball-park.

Interesting point. The spoken language came first. Undoubtedly spoken Chinese has been influenced by characters, but the fact remains that for many millions of Chinese, their language is indeed an unwritten one. I’m interested in the degree to which characters have strait-jacketed spoken Chinese into the language(s) we have today. I wonder if, in general, languages which have no written form tend to have longer utterances. I’d like to see some studies on that.

It’s interesting to note, from the Wikipedia page that Chris has referenced, that a slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal.

The Khmer language of Cambodia is noted for its complex consonant clusters and for being a non-tonal language in a region that abounds with tonal languages. But in some parts of Cambodia, notably Phnom Penh, the consonant clusters are becoming simplified and in their place tone differences are appearing. So this is a case of tonogenesis in action.

[quote=“Taffy”][quote=“Ironman”]When they considered using the alphabet in China the idea had to be quietly dropped because you’d end up with something like 9 different meanings plus… for one word and tone.

Example

xiao1 peel/ sharpen.
xiao1 eliminate/ vanish
xiao1 night
xiao1 breathe heavily/ cry out loudly.
xiao1 free
xiao1 cancel/ spend
xiao1 desolate
xiao1 sound of rain beating down or howling wind.
xiao1 noisy din, haughty or proud.

This is just from my 3,000 word dictionary. There must be lots more.
[/quote]

I have to disagree with you on this one Ironman. If you look at the language from the point of view of characters, then there are indeed a lot of homonyms. However, from your examples above - people don’t say xiao1 and expect others to know what they mean. That’s why Mandarin has so many two-syllable words. Xiao1 is too ambiguous, granted, but qu3xiao1 (cancel) is not, and that is how the language is actually used, in reducing ambiguity. Once you take into account multi-syllable words, spoken Chinese has a few more homonyms than English as a percentage, but we’re in the same ball-park.[/quote]

I’m more than happy to be disagreed with. It is such a piss off to start learning the language and see these types of things with dictionaries seeming to insist that you can say the same word the same way for 10 or more different meanings. It is in the context of a sentence and you could almost look on the xiao’s above as syllables and not words in their own right.

Am I more confused or getting this together?

Chris, you just shot the whole other syllable and character thing down. You bastard.

My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.

[quote=“gary”]My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.[/quote]It’s due to the arbitrariness of signs. Have a look at this page.
aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

Why is “ma4” to tell off, and “ma3” a horse? It’s the same reason (i.e. no particular reason) that a dog is a “dog” and not a “zurb”. We may think tones are something different and special. They’re not. They’re just part of the normal phonological system of some languages. While native speakers of non-tonal languages may percieve tones as being part of an “expressive intonation system”, for want of a better term, they aren’t. In the minds of Mandarin speakers, expressive intonation is completely separate from tones, which are part of the basic phonemic system.

Of course you get a few onomatopoeic exceptions. But they are really very few.

[quote=“gary”]My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.[/quote]

One could also ask why a certain character is pronounced starting with a “t” rather than an “m”. Chinese characters represent (meaningful) syllables, and syllables are spoken sound, and in Chinese this spoken sound includes a tone.

[quote=“joesax”][quote=“gary”]My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.[/quote]It’s due to the arbitrariness of signs. Have a look at this page.
aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

Why is “ma4” to tell off, and “ma3” a horse? It’s the same reason (i.e. no particular reason) that a dog is a “dog” and not a “zurb”. …[/quote]

Somehow I think there might a reason. Maybe not something we can find but I think it’s a area worth studying.

I have another, related, question that always comes to my mind when being confronted with Taiwanese (Minnan dialect).

Mandarin and Chinese have a lot of similarities, for example the English “good” is “hao” in Mandarin and “ho” in Taiwanese. Easy to see that those two are basically the same words.

So why is it that in Mandarin it’s “hao3” and in Taiwanese it’s “ho4”? And this seems to be a rule of some kind. 3rd tone in Mandarin means 4th tone in Taiwanese for words that are identical. Also some expression like “tai feng” are in reversed order in Taiwanese “hong tai”.

My Taiwanese is not that good but for those words I know that are fairly identical the tone is almost always different. How come? Is this based on a kind of deliberate act by ancient people in Fujian, like they pronounced everything different on purpose to show their opposition against the rulers who spoke Mandarin? Or is it just coincidence?

Anyone has done research on this topic?

[quote=“hannes”]Mandarin and Chinese have a lot of similarities, for example the English “good” is “hao” in Mandarin and “ho” in Taiwanese. Easy to see that those two are basically the same words.

So why is it that in Mandarin it’s “hao3” and in Taiwanese it’s “ho4”? And this seems to be a rule of some kind. 3rd tone in Mandarin means 4th tone in Taiwanese for words that are identical.

Is this based on a kind of deliberate act by ancient people in Fujian, like they pronounced everything different on purpose to show their opposition against the rulers who spoke Mandarin? Or is it just coincidence?[/quote]

This analogy extends to Cantonese, too: the Mandarin 3rd tone has a very high correspondence to the Cantonese high rising tone.

This is because all these stem from the “shang sheng” tone of Middle Chinese, and there remains a correspondence. There are other tonal correspondences. The nine tones of Cantonese can be traced to a “yin/yang” split of all four Middle Chinese tones due to loss of consonant voicing, plus a further split of one of the “entering” tones nased on vowel length.

In Mandarin, the “yin/yang” split only occurred in the “ping sheng”, resulting in the modern “1st” and “2nd” tones, while the “entering tone” disappeared entirely, and the syllables are now distribute among the other tones.

As for Taiwanese, the language still preserves the voiced /b/ and /g/ consonants of Middle Chinese that are lost in Mandarin and Cantonese, while the /d/ became the Taiwanese /l/. I don’t know anything about how the Taiwanese tones developed.

I don’t know if the changes were conscious or not. Many languages have histories of conscious change (e.g. a certain dialect or pronunciation falling into favor or disfavor for political reasons). But I suspect it’s natural, given the continuity of mutual intelligibilty along the Chinese coast extending from Guangdong all the way to the north…at least I have read about it, I’m not an expert in it. The dialects developed from Middle Chinese over a period of some 1500 years, diverging due to distance, isolation and poor communication.

[quote=“gary”][quote=“joesax”][quote=“gary”]My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.[/quote]It’s due to the arbitrariness of signs. Have a look at this page.
aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

Why is “ma4” to tell off, and “ma3” a horse? It’s the same reason (i.e. no particular reason) that a dog is a “dog” and not a “zurb”. …[/quote]

Somehow I think there might a reason. Maybe not something we can find but I think it’s a area worth studying.[/quote]Presumably Saussure did too! When you’ve finished revising semiology perhaps you could report back on the results.

thanks for the info, Chris

“yin/yang split”… sounds like a very healthy ice-cream to me… :smiley:

no matter the reason, would be much easier to speak Taiwanese, if only they would use tones the way they do it in Mandarin… :unamused:

[quote=“joesax”][quote=“gary”][quote=“joesax”][quote=“gary”]My question isn’t about why tones exist. :slight_smile:

It’s about why a specific character has one tone instead of another.[/quote]It’s due to the arbitrariness of signs. Have a look at this page.
aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

Why is “ma4” to tell off, and “ma3” a horse? It’s the same reason (i.e. no particular reason) that a dog is a “dog” and not a “zurb”. …[/quote]

Somehow I think there might a reason. Maybe not something we can find but I think it’s a area worth studying.[/quote]Presumably Saussure did too! When you’ve finished revising semiology perhaps you could report back on the results.[/quote]

haha. I think Saussure’s course notes are now available in English. I think my friend sold my French copy when I moved to Taiwan. Will have to get it again.