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70-694: The term was coined in 1953 by the linguist Samuel Martin from the Greek ξένος ( xénos , 'foreign'); Martin called these borrowings "Sino-Xenic dialects". Limited borrowing from Chinese into Vietnamese and Korean occurred during the Han dynasty . During the Tang dynasty (618–907), Chinese writing, language and culture were imported wholesale into Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Scholars in those countries wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with

140-638: A PhD in Japanese Linguistics under Bernard Bloch . He completed his dissertation on Japanese morphophonemics in 1950 (published as a monograph by the Linguistic Society of America the following year), and was immediately offered a position at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. He was made professor of Far Eastern Linguistics in 1962, and chaired both the Department of East and South Asian Languages and

210-494: A detailed description of both 20th-century Korean and Middle Korean morphemes , making it a valuable tool for those researching the history and structure of the Korean language. In addition to his scholarly linguistic works, Martin was interested in the teaching of East Asian languages, and he wrote a number of elementary texts and dictionaries for beginners. According to a Merriam-Webster blog called Words We're Watching , Martin

280-550: 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 Chinese, 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

350-550: A huge number of tones as well. The most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not east Asia. 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 ,

420-659: A language with five registers. However, the most that are actually used in a language is a tenth of that number. Several Kam–Sui languages of southern China have nine contrastive tones, including contour tones. For example, the Kam language has 9 tones: 3 more-or-less fixed tones (high, mid and low); 4 unidirectional tones (high and low rising, high and low falling); and 2 bidirectional tones (dipping and peaking). This assumes that checked syllables are not counted as having additional tones, as they traditionally are in China. For example, in

490-433: 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,

560-542: A monograph on Japanese orthography in 1952, and in 1954 he was invited by Syngman Rhee , President of South Korea, to give his ideas on the orthographic reform of the Korean script , which were published in 1954 in various Korean newspapers. In 1954 he devised the Yale romanization system for transliterating Korean, which is extensively used by linguists. During this period he also made important contributions on Chinese, producing

630-517: A monograph on the phonemes of Ancient Chinese in 1953, and an important article on Mandarin phonology in 1957. During the 1960s Martin extended his linguistic talents to studies of the Dagur language (1961), and the Shodon dialect of Ryukyuan (1970). His most famous work from this period was a 1966 article, "Lexical evidence relating Korean to Japanese", that was based on a systematic application of

700-437: A monosyllabic word (3), but there is no such difference in a word-tone language. For example, Shanghainese has two contrastive (phonemic) 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,

770-797: A multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone. Unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in the grammar of modern standard Chinese, though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance (such as changing a verb to a noun or vice versa). Most tonal languages have a combination of register and contour tones. Tone is typical of languages including Kra–Dai , Vietic , Sino-Tibetan , Afroasiatic , Khoisan , Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. Most tonal languages combine both register and contour tones, such as Cantonese , which produces three varieties of contour tone at three different pitch levels, and

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840-493: A number of Mandarin Chinese suffixes and grammatical particles have what is called (when describing Mandarin Chinese) 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: After high level and high rising tones, the neutral syllable has an independent pitch that looks like

910-570: A result, there are several layers of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese. The oldest loans, roughly 400 words dating from the Eastern Han , have been fully assimilated and are treated as native Vietnamese words. Sino-Vietnamese proper dates to the early Tang dynasty, when the spread of Chinese rime dictionaries and other literature resulted in the wholesale importation of the Chinese lexicon. Isolated Chinese words also began to enter Korean from

980-618: A similar three-way division, but the voicing contrast would later disappear in the tone split that affected several languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , including Vietnamese and most Chinese varieties. Old Japanese had only a two-way contrast based on voicing, while Middle Korean had only one obstruent at each point of articulation. The Middle Chinese final consonants were semivowels (or glides ) /j/ and /w/, nasals /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/, and stops /p/, /t/ and /k/. Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Korean preserve all

1050-527: 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. In the most widely spoken tonal language, Mandarin Chinese , tones are distinguished by their distinctive shape, known as contour , with each tone having a different internal pattern of rising and falling pitch. Many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In

1120-670: A tone is used to mark aspect . The first work that mentioned this was published in 1986. Example paradigms: Tones are used to differentiate cases as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania ): Certain varieties of Chinese are known to express meaning by means of tone change although further investigations are required. Examples from two Yue dialects spoken in Guangdong Province are shown below. In Taishan , tone change indicates

1190-471: A variety of linguistic topics, notably Middle Korean . In 1994, Martin was awarded the Korean government's Presidential Medal of Honor for Distinguished Cultural Contributions . In the 1950s Martin worked on issues relating to Japanese and Korean orthography and romanizations. At this time he coined the term " Sino-Xenic " in creating a common nomenclature for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary , Sino-Korean vocabulary and Sino-Japanese vocabulary . He published

1260-405: A winner emerged, and sometimes, the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, scientific, abstract or formal language or registers . For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines (where borrowings from English are common), over half the words in newspapers and 60% of

1330-519: A word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Most languages use pitch as intonation to convey prosody and pragmatics , but this does not make them tonal languages. In tonal languages, each syllable has an inherent pitch contour, and thus minimal pairs (or larger minimal sets) exist between syllables with the same segmental features (consonants and vowels) but different tones. Vietnamese and Chinese have heavily studied tone systems, as well as amongst their various dialects. Below

1400-545: Is "widely credited" with coining the term " nibling " as a gender-neutral term for a nephew or niece, by analogy with the word "sibling" (though Merriam-Webster's lexicographers had been unable to verify this directly). Tone (linguistics) Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what

1470-684: 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 relative-pitch and contour tones, such as many Kru languages and other Niger-Congo languages of West Africa. Falling tones tend to fall further than rising tones rise; high–low tones are common, whereas low–high tones are quite rare. A language with contour tones will also generally have as many or more falling tones than rising tones. However, exceptions are not unheard of; Mpi , for example, has three level and three rising tones, but no falling tones. Another difference between tonal languages

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1540-714: Is a morphologically conditioned alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy. Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern Southern Min are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes. Examples: 長 tng 'long' vs. tng 'grow'; 斷 tng 'break' vs. tng 'cause to break'. Also, 毒 in Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations: to̍k (entering tone) means 'poison' or 'poisonous', while thāu (departing tone) means 'to kill with poison'. The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka. In East Asia, tone

1610-592: Is a table of the six Vietnamese tones and their corresponding tone accent or diacritics: Mandarin Chinese , which has five tones , transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels: These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription: These may be combined into a tongue-twister : See also one-syllable article . A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is: A Vietnamese tongue twister: A Cantonese tongue twister: Tone

1680-697: Is called intonation , but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme . Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in

1750-737: Is debate over the definition of pitch accent and whether a coherent definition is even possible. Both lexical or grammatical tone and prosodic intonation are cued by changes in pitch, as well as sometimes by changes in phonation. Lexical tone coexists with intonation, with the lexical changes of pitch like waves superimposed on larger swells. For example, Luksaneeyanawin (1993) describes three intonational patterns in Thai: falling (with semantics of "finality, closedness, and definiteness"), rising ("non-finality, openness and non-definiteness") and "convoluted" (contrariness, conflict and emphasis). The phonetic realization of these intonational patterns superimposed on

1820-866: Is highly conserved among members. However, when considered in addition to "simple" tone systems that include only two tones, tone, as a whole, appears to be more labile, appearing several times within Indo-European languages, several times in American languages, and several times in Papuan families. That may indicate that rather than a trait unique to some language families, tone is a latent feature of most language families that may more easily arise and disappear as languages change over time. A 2015 study by Caleb Everett argued that tonal languages are more common in hot and humid climates, which make them easier to pronounce, even when considering familial relationships. If

1890-476: Is marked and which is the default. In Navajo , for example, syllables have a low tone by default, whereas marked syllables have high tone. In the related language Sekani , however, the default is high tone, and marked syllables have low tone. There are parallels with stress: English stressed syllables have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables. In many Bantu languages , tones are distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other. In multisyllable words,

1960-496: Is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages , but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian . It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which

2030-536: Is that the various borrowings are based on different local pronunciations at different periods. Nevertheless, it is common to treat the pronunciations as developments from the categories of the Middle Chinese rime dictionaries. Middle Chinese is recorded as having eight series of initial consonants, though it is likely that no single dialect distinguished them all. Stops and affricates could also be voiced , voiceless or voiceless aspirated . Early Vietnamese had

2100-499: Is the case in Punjabi . Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi . In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese , for example, the ngã and sắc tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the nặng and huyền tones are both low-falling, but

2170-724: Is typically lexical. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms . This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong . However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone can be both lexical and grammatical. In the Kru languages , a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood , person , and polarity , so that tone may be

Sino-Xenic vocabularies - Misplaced Pages Continue

2240-475: Is whether the tones apply independently to each syllable or to the word as a whole. In Cantonese , Thai , and Kru languages , each syllable may have a tone, whereas in Shanghainese , Swedish , Norwegian 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

2310-487: The chữ Nôm script used for Vietnamese until the early 20th century, some Chinese characters could represent both a Sino-Vietnamese word and a native Vietnamese word with similar meaning or sound to the Chinese word, but would often be marked with a diacritic when the native reading was intended. However, in the Korean mixed script , Chinese characters ( hanja ) are only used for Sino-Korean words. The character-based Vietnamese and Korean scripts have since been replaced by

2380-479: The nặng tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the huyền tone is longer and often has breathy voice . In some languages, such as Burmese , pitch and phonation are so closely intertwined that the two are combined in a single phonological system, where neither can be considered without the other. The distinctions of such systems are termed registers . The tone register here should not be confused with register tone described in

2450-480: The Chinese classics , which they read aloud in systematic local approximations of Middle Chinese . With those pronunciations, Chinese words entered Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese in huge numbers. The plains of northern Vietnam were under Chinese control for most of the period from 111 BC to AD 938. After independence, the country adopted Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship. As

2520-568: The Old Japanese vowels i 1 and e 1 while grade III is represented by i 2 and e 2 . Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese scholars also later each adapted the Chinese script to write their languages, using Chinese characters both for borrowed and native vocabulary. Thus, in the Japanese script, Chinese characters may have both Sino-Japanese readings ( on'yomi ) and native readings ( kun'yomi ). Similarly, in

2590-675: The Vietnamese alphabet and hangul respectively, although Korean does still use Hanja to an extent. Foreign pronunciations of these words inevitably only approximated the original Chinese, and many distinctions were lost. In particular, Korean and Japanese had far fewer consonants and much simpler syllables than Chinese, and they lacked tones . Even Vietnamese merged some Chinese initial consonants (for example, several different consonants were merged into t and th while ph corresponds to both p and f in Mandarin). A further complication

2660-553: The basic numerals , was borrowed over a range of periods from the Han (or earlier) to the Tang. Since the pioneering work of Bernhard Karlgren , these bodies of pronunciations have been used together with modern varieties of Chinese in attempts to reconstruct the sounds of Middle Chinese. They provide such broad and systematic coverage that the linguist Samuel Martin called them "Sino-Xenic dialects", treating them as parallel branches with

2730-457: The 1st century BC, but the main influx occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries after the unification of the peninsula by Silla . The flow of Chinese words into Korean became overwhelming after the establishment of civil service examinations in 958. Japanese has two well-preserved layers and a third that is also significant: In contrast, vocabulary of Chinese origin in Thai , including most of

2800-431: The Chinese upper and lower rising tone while the sắc and nặng tones reflect the upper and lower departing tone. Unlike northern Chinese varieties, Sino-Vietnamese places level-tone words with sonorant and glottal stop initials in the upper level ( ngang ) category. Large numbers of Chinese words were borrowed into Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese and still form a large and important part of their lexicons. In

2870-566: The Department of Linguistics. He also served as director of undergraduate studies in linguistics and director of graduate studies in East Asian languages and literatures. He was an executive fellow of Timothy Dwight College. After Martin retired from Yale University, he moved to near Vancouver, Washington , near where his wife Nancy Rendell Martin had grown up, and close to Portland, Oregon , where his daughter Norah Martin teaches philosophy. During his retirement, Martin continued research on

Sino-Xenic vocabularies - Misplaced Pages Continue

2940-422: The Middle Chinese coda -ng yielded a nasalized vowel, which in combination with the preceding vowel has become a long vowel in modern Japanese. For example, Tōkyō 東京 , is Dōngjīng in Mandarin Chinese. Also, as Japanese cannot end words with consonants (except for moraic n ), borrowings of Middle Chinese words ending in a stop had a paragoge added so that, for example, Middle Chinese kwok ( 國 )

3010-565: The Omotic (Afroasiatic) language Bench , which employs five level tones and one or two rising tones across levels. Most varieties of Chinese use contour tones, 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 (except northwestern Bantu) on the other hand, have simpler tone systems usually with high, low and one or two contour tone (usually in long vowels). In such systems there

3080-433: 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;

3150-575: The case of Japanese, the influx has led to changes in the phonological structure of the language. Old Japanese syllables had the form (C)V, with vowel sequences being avoided. To accommodate the Chinese loanwords, syllables were extended with glides as in myō , vowel sequences as in mei , geminate consonants and a final nasal, leading to the moraic structure of later Japanese. Voiced sounds ( b , d , z , g and r ) were now permitted in word-initial position, where they had previously been impossible. The influx of Chinese vocabulary contributed to

3220-495: The comparative method, and which advanced the hypothesis that Korean and Japanese are genetically related. He also published articles on subjects that had been very little studied until that time, such as sound symbolism in Korean (1962) and speech styles in Japan and Korea (1964). His monumental work, Reference Grammar of Japanese , was published in 1975, and together with his Japanese Language through Time (1987) are landmarks in

3290-402: The conclusions of Everett's work are sound, this is perhaps the first known case of influence of the environment on the structure of the languages spoken in it. The proposed relationship between climate and tone is controversial, and logical and statistical issues have been raised by various scholars. Tone has long been viewed as a phonological system. It was not until recent years that tone

3360-525: The development of Middle Korean tones, which are still present in some dialects. Sino-Korean words have also disrupted the native structure in which l does not occur in word-initial position, and words show vowel harmony . Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts in a similar way to the use of Latin and Greek roots in English. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in

3430-517: The differentiation of tones. Investigations from the 2010s using perceptual experiments seem to suggest phonation counts as a perceptual cue. Many languages use tone in a more limited way. In Japanese , fewer than half of the words have a 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, there

3500-530: The distinctions between final nasals and stops, like southern Chinese varieties such as Yue . Sino-Vietnamese has added allophonic distinctions to -ng and -k , based on whether the preceding vowel is front ( -nh , -ch ) or back ( -ng , -c ). Although Old Korean had a /t/ coda, words with the Middle Chinese coda /t/ have /l/ in Sino-Korean, reflecting a northern variety of Late Middle Chinese in which final /t/ had weakened to /r/. In go-on and kan-on ,

3570-477: The distribution; for groups like Khoi-San in Southern Africa and Papuan languages, whole families of languages possess tonality but simply have relatively few members, and for some North American tone languages, multiple independent origins are suspected. If generally considering only complex-tone vs. no-tone, it might be concluded that tone is almost always an ancient feature within a language family that

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3640-422: 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

3710-440: The five lexical tones of Thai (in citation form) are as follows: With convoluted intonation, it appears that high and falling tone conflate, while the low tone with convoluted intonation has the same contour as rising tone with rising intonation. 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

3780-418: The late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. The coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often, different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before

3850-475: The native Chinese dialects. The foreign pronunciations sometimes retain distinctions lost in all the modern Chinese varieties, as in the case of the chongniu distinction found in Middle Chinese rime dictionaries . Similarly, the distinction between grades III and IV made by the Late Middle Chinese rime tables has disappeared in most modern varieties, but in kan-on , grade IV is represented by

3920-412: The next section. Gordon and Ladefoged established a continuum of phonation, where several types can be identified. Kuang identified two types of phonation: pitch-dependent and pitch-independent . Contrast of tones has long been thought of as differences in pitch height. However, several studies pointed out that tone is actually multidimensional. Contour, duration, and phonation may all contribute to

3990-418: The only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go". In Yoruba , much of the lexical and grammatical information is carried by tone. In languages of West Africa such as Yoruba, people may even communicate with so-called " talking drums ", which are modulated to imitate the tones of the language, or by whistling the tones of speech. Note that tonal languages are not distributed evenly across

4060-407: 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

4130-462: The phrase 很好 [xɤn˧˥ xaʊ˨˩˦] ('very good'). The two transcriptions may be conflated with reversed tone letters as [xɤn˨˩˦꜔꜒xaʊ˨˩˦] . Tone sandhi in Sinitic languages can be classified with a left-dominant or right-dominant system. In a language of the right-dominant system, the right-most syllable of a word retains its citation tone (i.e., the tone in its isolation form). All the other syllables of

4200-617: The same range as non-tonal languages. Instead, the majority of tone languages belong to the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Vietic groups, which are then composed by a large majority of tone languages and dominate a single region. Only in limited locations (South Africa, New Guinea, Mexico, Brazil and a few others) do tone languages occur as individual members or small clusters within a non-tone dominated area. In some locations, like Central America, it may represent no more than an incidental effect of which languages were included when one examines

4270-413: The study of the grammar and history of the Japanese language. During the 1980s Martin concentrated his research activities on Middle Korean , making detailed analysis of numerous 15th and 16th century Korean texts, which he used as the basis for a database of Middle Korean linguistic structures and examples. This work formed the backbone of his monumental Reference Grammar of Korean (1993) which provides

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4340-520: The term includes both inflectional and derivational morphology. Tian described a grammatical tone, the induced creaky tone , in Burmese . Languages may distinguish up to five levels of pitch, though the Chori language of Nigeria is described as distinguishing six surface tone registers. Since tone contours may involve up to two shifts in pitch, there are theoretically 5 × 5 × 5 = 125 distinct tones for

4410-406: 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. Lexical tones are used to distinguish lexical meanings. Grammatical tones, on the other hand, change the grammatical categories . To some authors,

4480-421: The tones of Middle Korean, but they have since been lost in all but a few dialects. By contrast, Sino-Vietnamese reflects the Chinese tones fairly faithfully, including the Late Middle Chinese split of each tone into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial. The correspondence to the Chinese rising and departing tones is reversed from the earlier loans, so the Vietnamese hỏi and ngã tones reflect

4550-914: The traditional reckoning, the Kam language has 15 tones, but 6 occur only in syllables closed with the voiceless stop consonants /p/ , /t/ or /k/ and the other 9 occur only in syllables not ending in one of these sounds. Preliminary work on the Wobe language (part of the Wee continuum) of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, the Ticuna language of the Amazon and the Chatino languages of southern Mexico suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more. The Guere language , Dan language and Mano language of Liberia and Ivory Coast have around 10 tones, give or take. The Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have

4620-475: The word must take their sandhi form. Taiwanese Southern Min is known for its complex sandhi system. Example: 鹹kiam 'salty'; 酸sng 'sour'; 甜tinn 'sweet'; 鹹酸甜kiam 7 sng 7 tinn 'candied fruit'. In this example, only the last syllable remains unchanged. Subscripted numbers represent the changed tone. Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi . Tone sandhi is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however,

4690-543: The words in science magazines. Samuel Martin (linguist) Samuel Elmo Martin (29 January 1924 – 28 November 2009) was an American linguist known for seminal work on the languages of East Asia, a professor at Yale University , and the author of many works on the Korean and Japanese languages. Martin was born in Pittsburg, Kansas on 29 January 1924, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas . During World War II he

4760-495: Was borrowed as koku . The later, less common Tōsō-on borrowings, however, reflect the reduction of final stops in Lower Yangtze Mandarin varieties to a glottal stop, reflected by Japanese /Q/. Middle Chinese had a three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. As Japanese lacks tones, Sino-Japanese borrowings preserve no trace of Chinese tones. Most Middle Chinese tones were preserved in

4830-537: Was found to play a role in inflectional morphology . Palancar and Léonard (2016) provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico ), where tones are able to distinguish mood , person , and number : In Iau language (the most tonally complex Lakes Plain language , predominantly monosyllabic), nouns have an inherent tone (e.g. be˧ 'fire' but be˦˧ 'flower'), but verbs don't have any inherent tone. For verbs,

4900-527: Was trained as a Japanese Language Officer, and was stationed in Japan at the end of the war. After the war, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley , where he majored in Oriental Languages. He graduated in 1947, but stayed on at Berkeley to study for a master's degree in linguistics under Chao Yuen Ren , which he completed in 1949. He then went to Yale University to study for

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