Chinese Languages and Dialects

Campbell Universal Pinyin (CUP)

When doing field research on tones, it's good to prepare an arsenal of vocabulary to test for the various tonal changes. First, the vocabulary chosen must comply to the ancient tonal scheme, not to a Mandarin or Putonghua tonal scheme as this will only complicate matters. This is what I call the Sinitic Universal Tone System. This means that vocabulary must be chosen to fit the 4 tone categories, 平 (biə́ŋ), 上 (ʑiǎŋ), 去 (kʰiò), 入 (ɲiəp), selecting carefully words that fall into various divisions of each category, 陰 (ʔiə́m) and陽 (iáŋ) (also known as 清 (ʦʰiáɲ) and 濁 (ɟak)--I use A and B), for words beginning with unvoiced and voiced consonants respectively (this distinction is still preserved in Wu, but almost completely disappeared in most of the other modern Sinitic languages). A further distinction should be made regarding the aspiration carried by initial consonants and their tone distinctions as this sometimes causes words with specific tones to split or regroup in other groups. These distinctions are called 次 (ʦʰì) and 全 (ʣyán) respectively. In all of these cases, the Chinese names actually carry the characteristics of the categories they represent.

Instead of doing just an analysis on the tones, at the same time you can carry out tests on tone sandhi. Using choice vocabulary should get the job done in most instances, however in some cases when you may be getting completely different tones for all the words, you'll need to take a look at the grammatical structure of the phrase, for example maybe one vocabulary is a verb-object compound as compared to other vocabulary.

Here is a list of words that can accomplish this task, as published in 钱乃荣's book, 北部吴语研究. The words are those that are commonly found in the speech of Wu speakers, not something too bookish that requires them to have to think too hard to say the word.

Now if we analyze Mandarin, the language most readers will be familiar with, we will then see how the tones have moved and diverged from the ancient language into this modern language:

From the Mandarin results above, we can clearly see that the 2nd and 4th tone categories are highly unstable. Let's look at the 2nd tone category first. The chart has not been set up to make 次全 distinctions in final syllables (across the top), but it does in onset syllables (along the left). So if I see unpredictive results in final syllables vertically, I have to look at what's happening to them horizontally in the onset syllables. It seems that in certain final positions 2A and 2B both have 21(3) (some speakers pronounce the rise to 3 and others don't). We can assume this could the result of tone sandhi or it is a contour tone. We can't be entirely sure yet. In all other cases the 2nd category has 21 or 51. 51 occurs in first position 100% in the 2B全濁 category. It also explains why looking vertically down 2B I can see half and half 51 and 21(3) in final position and no 51 in vertical 2A in final position. 51 is the constant and unchanging tone in category 3, so I can now make the assumption that 2B全濁 has merged with category 3. Since tone 1B is constant as 35, I can assume that is the citation tone. When 2A and 2B seem to be changing to 35, I can assume this is a 2A/B sandhi tone and that 21 is a variant of the full form 21(3) which appears in final position.

Now let's look at category 4. This is not so hard to figure out. By looking at the phonology of the words in Mandarin, I know that none of them end in stops, which rules out the existence of a category 4 tone. So the question is what tones did the category 4 words adopt in modern Mandarin? Clearly 4B次 became 51 (category 3), and 4B全 became 35 (category 1B). Both 4A全 and 4A次 look quite haphazard and may require further examples and study. The fact is we already know there is no rhyme or reason to the the 4A tones in Mandarin; they have adopted tones 1A, 1B, 2 (only 4A全) and 3 haphazardly. What is interesting to note is that almost none of the category 4 words adopted the weak category 2 tones. Is it because there is a tendency for the category 2 to disappear? Will this tone end up disappearing in future generations of Mandarin speakers? The same weaknesses can be found looking at the dialects of many of the Sinitic languages.