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66-396: Hmongic (Miao) and Mienic (Yao) are closely related, but clearly distinct. For internal classifications, see Hmongic languages and Mienic languages . The largest differences are due to divergent developments in their phonological systems . The Hmongic languages appear to have kept the large set of initial consonants featured in the protolanguage but greatly reduced the distinctions in

132-550: 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

198-530: A family of their own, the lexical and typological similarities among Hmong–Mien and Sinitic languages being attributed to contact-induced influence. Paul K. Benedict , an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Hmong–Mien languages. The hypothesis never received much acceptance for Hmong–Mien, however. Kosaka (2002) argued specifically for a Miao– Dai family. The most likely homeland of

264-550: 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 ,

330-659: 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

396-433: 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,

462-437: 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,

528-797: 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

594-493: 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

660-573: A script historically. Around 1905, Samuel Pollard introduced the Pollard script , for the A-Hmao language , an abugida inspired by Canadian Aboriginal syllabics , by his own admission. Several other syllabic alphabets were designed as well, the most notable being Shong Lue Yang 's Pahawh Hmong script, which originated in Laos for the purpose of writing Hmong Daw , Hmong Njua , and other dialects of

726-603: A separate written standard. Wu and Yang (2010) believe that standards should be developed for each of the six other primary varieties of Chuangqiandian as well, although the position of romanization in the scope of Hmong language preservation remains a debate. Romanization remains common in China and the United States, while versions of the Lao and Thai scripts remain common in Thailand and Laos. Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong script

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792-527: 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

858-670: 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

924-519: 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

990-684: 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

1056-714: 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

1122-592: 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

1188-697: 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

1254-737: 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

1320-866: 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

1386-476: 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,

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1452-496: 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

1518-679: Is quite typical of the region. They are SVO in word order but are not as rigidly right-branching as the Tai–Kadai languages or most Mon–Khmer languages , since they have genitives and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in adpositions : serial verb constructions replace most functions of adpositions in languages like English. For example, a construction translating as "be near" would be used where in English prepositions like "in" or "at" would be used. Besides their tonality and lack of adpositions, another striking feature

1584-652: Is the abundance of numeral classifiers and their use where other languages use definite articles or demonstratives to modify nouns. Various unclassified Sinitic languages are spoken by ethnic Miao and Yao . These languages have variously been proposed as having Hmong-Mien substrata or as mixed languages , including languages such as She Chinese , Laba , Lingling , Maojia , Badong Yao , various Lowland Yao languages including Yeheni , Shaozhou Tuhua , and various Pinghua dialects. Hmongic languages The Hmongic languages , also known as Miao languages ( Chinese : 苗语 ; pinyin : Miáoyǔ ), include

1650-599: Is the biggest subgroup within the Hmongic peoples. Many overseas Hmong prefer the name Hmong , and claim that Meo (a Southeast Asian language change from Miao) is both inaccurate and pejorative, though it is generally considered neutral by the Miao community in China. Of the core Hmongic languages spoken by ethnic Miao, there are a number of overlapping names. The three branches are as follows, as named by Purnell (in English and Chinese), Ratliff, and scholars in China, as well as

1716-499: 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

1782-724: 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

1848-475: 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

1914-479: 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

1980-576: The Miao languages into Eastern, Northern, Central, and Western subgroups. Strecker's classification is as follows: In a follow-up to that paper in the same publication, Strecker tentatively removed Pa-Hng, Wunai, Jiongnai, and Yunuo, positing that they may be independent branches of Miao–Yao, with the possibility that Yao was the first of these to branch off. Effectively, this means that Miao/Hmongic would consist of six branches: She (Ho-Nte), Pa-Hng, Wunai, Jiongnai, Yunuo, and everything else. In addition,

2046-436: The ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous. Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong–Mien languages tend to be monosyllabic and syntactically analytic . They are some of the most highly tonal languages in the world: Longmo and Zongdi Hmong have as many as twelve distinct tones. They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of voiceless sonorants and uvular consonants ; otherwise their phonology

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2112-497: The 'everything else' would include nine distinct but unclassified branches, which were not addressed by either Matisoff or Ratliff (see West Hmongic#Strecker ). Matisoff followed the basic outline of Strecker (1987), apart from consolidating the Bunu languages and leaving She unclassified: Wang & Deng (2003) is one of the few Chinese sources which integrate the Bunu languages into Hmongic on purely linguistic grounds. They find

2178-527: The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), an experimental algorithm for automatic generation of phonologically based phylogenies. The Mandarin names for these languages are Miáo and Yáo . In Vietnamese , the name for Hmong is H'Mông , and the name for Mien is Dao (i.e., Yao), although Miền is also used. Meo , Hmu , Mong , Hmao , and Hmong are local names for Miao, but since most Laotian refugees in

2244-727: The Hebrew alphabets, although the characters themselves are different. Due to intensive language contact , there are several language varieties in China which are thought to be mixed Miao–Chinese languages or Sinicized Miao. These include: In southwestern Hunan , divergent Sinitic language varieties spoken by Miao and Yao peoples include: 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

2310-573: The Hmong-Mien languages must also address the position of Xong. Yoshihisa Taguchi's (2012, 2013) computational phylogenetic study classifies the Hmongic languages as follows. Hsiu's (2015, 2018) computational phylogenetic study classifies the Hmongic languages as follows, based primarily on lexical data from Chen (2013). The Hmongic languages have been written with at least a dozen different scripts, none of which has been universally accepted among Hmong people as standard. Tradition has it that

2376-618: The Hmong–Mien languages is in Southern China between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages might have migrated from Central China either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han Chinese. Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place during the 17th century (1600–1700). Ancient DNA evidence suggests that

2442-565: 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

2508-509: The Proto-Hmong-Mien rime was open or closed. Both also retain the second part of Proto-Hmong-Mien diphthongs, which is lost in most other Hmongic languages, since they tend to preserve only the first part of Proto-Hmong-Mien diphthongs. Ratliff notes that the position of Xong ( North Hmongic ) is still quite uncertain. Since Xong preserves many archaic features not found in most other Hmongic languages, any future attempts at classifying

2574-483: The United States call themselves Hmong/Mong , this name has become better known in English than the others in recent decades. However, except for some scholars who prefer the word, the term 'Hmong/Mong' is only used within certain Hmong/Miao language speaking communities in China, where the majority of the Miao speakers live. In Mandarin, despite the fact that it was once a derogatory term, the word Miao (Chinese: 苗;

2640-433: 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;

2706-653: The ancestors of the Hmong, the Nanman , had a written language with a few pieces of significant literature. When the Han-era Chinese began to expand southward into the land of the Hmong, whom they considered barbarians, the script of the Hmong was lost, according to many stories. Allegedly, the script was preserved in the clothing. Attempts at revival were made by the creation of a script in the Qing Dynasty, but this

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2772-744: The ancestors of the speakers of the Hmong–Mien languages were a population genetically distinct from that of the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language source populations at a location on the Yangtze River . Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports the proposition that people who speak the Hmong–Mien languages are descended from a population that is distantly related to those who now speak the Mon-Khmer languages. The date of Proto-Hmong–Mien has been estimated to be about 2500 BP (500 BC) by Sagart, Blench, and Sanchez-Mazas using traditional methods employing many lines of evidence, and about 4243 BP (2250 BC) by

2838-402: 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

2904-788: The descriptive names based on the patterns and colors of traditional dress: The Hunan Province Gazetteer (1997) gives the following autonyms for various peoples in Hunan classified by the Chinese government as Miao . Hmongic is one of the primary branches of the Hmong–Mien language family , with the other being Mienic . Hmongic is a diverse group of perhaps twenty languages, based on mutual intelligibility, but several of these are dialectically quite diverse in phonology and vocabulary, and are not considered to be single languages by their speakers. There are probably over thirty languages taking this into account. Four classifications are outlined below, though

2970-474: The details of the West Hmongic branch are left for that article. Mo Piu , first documented in 2009, was reported by Geneviève Caelen-Haumont (2011) to be a divergent Hmongic language, and was later determined to be a dialect of Guiyang Miao . Similarly, Ná-Meo is not addressed in the classifications below, but is believed by Nguyen (2007) to be closest to Hmu (Qiandong Miao). Purnell (1970) divided

3036-517: 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

3102-477: 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

3168-422: 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

3234-440: 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

3300-679: The following pattern in the statistics of core Swadesh vocabulary: Matisoff (2006) outlined the following. Not all varieties are listed. Matisoff also indicates Hmongic influence on Gelao in his outline. The Hmongic classification below is from Martha Ratliff (2010:3). Ratliff (2010) notes that Pa-Hng , Jiongnai , and Xong ( North Hmongic ) are phonologically conservative, as they retain many Proto-Hmongic features that have been lost in most other daughter languages. For instance, both Pa-Hng and Xong have vowel quality distinctions (and also tone distinctions in Xong) depending on whether or not

3366-412: 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

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3432-418: 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

3498-407: 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

3564-462: 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

3630-617: 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

3696-454: The standard Hmong language . In the 1950s, pinyin-based Latin alphabets were devised by the Chinese government for three varieties of Miao: Xong , Hmu , and Chuangqiandian (Hmong) , as well as a Latin alphabet for A-Hmao to replace the Pollard script (now known as "Old Miao"), though Pollard remains popular. This meant that each of the branches of Miao in the classification of the time had

3762-476: The syllable finals, in particular losing all glides and stop codas . The Mienic languages, on the other hand, have largely preserved syllable finals but reduced the number of initial consonants. Early linguistic classifications placed the Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan family , where they remain in many Chinese classifications. The current consensus among Western linguists is that they constitute

3828-520: 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

3894-406: 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,

3960-548: The tone varies according to the Sinitic dialect) is now commonly used by members of all nationalities to refer to the language and the ethnolinguistic group. The Mandarin name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality , which is a multicultural rather than ethnolinguistic group. It includes peoples speaking Mien, Kra–Dai , Yi , and Miao languages, the latter called Bùnǔ rather than Miáo when spoken by Yao. For this reason,

4026-914: 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

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4092-490: The various languages spoken by the Miao people (such as Hmong , Hmu , and Xong ). Hmongic languages also include various languages spoken by non- Mienic -speaking Yao people , such as Pa-Hng , Bunu , Jiongnai , Younuo , and others, while She is spoken by ethnic She people . Miao ( 苗 ) is the Chinese name and the one used by Miao in China. However, Hmong is more familiar in the West, due to Hmong emigration. Hmong

4158-475: 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,

4224-460: Was also brutally suppressed and no remnant literature has been found. Adaptations of Chinese characters have been found in Hunan, recently. However, this evidence and mythological understanding is disputed. For example, according to Professor S. Robert Ramsey, there was no writing system among the Miao until the missionaries created them. It is currently unknown for certain whether or not the Hmong had

4290-450: Was created by Reverend Chervang Kong Vang to be able to capture Hmong vocabulary clearly and also to remedy redundancies in the language as well as address semantic confusions that was lacking in other scripts. This was created in the 1980s and was mainly used by United Christians Liberty Evangelical Church, a church also founded by Vang. The script bears strong resemblance to the Lao alphabet in structure and form and characters inspired from

4356-537: 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,

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