Did old Chinese have tones?

According to Wikipedia, Old Chinese didn’t have tones, but it did have consonant clusters. As they lost these consonant clusters, the tones arose.

Do all Chinese languages have tones?

Chinese is, as many know, a tonal language. There are four tones: one flat, one rising, one that falls and then rises, and one falling. There is also the possibility for a syllable to be said with no tone at all, which some refer to as the fifth tone.

When did tones develop in Chinese?

Political forces have played a key role in shaping this urban pattern. The historical development of Chinese urban morphology experienced four phases: the walled city (770 BC-AD 906), the open city (618-1840), the colonial city (1840-1949), and the socialist city (1949-1985).

How did Chinese have tones?

The most common newer view is that tones are of secondary origin in Chinese and arose through a process called “tonogenesis”, a term coined by James A. Matisoff. Briefly, East Asian tonogenesis is conceived of as a process in which phonemic tones arose when certain early syllable final consonants were lost.

Why some languages have tones?

Put simply, a tone is a change or stress in pitch to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. Tones are predominantly employed in languages which have multiple meanings for one word, so as to distinguish meaning through either pronunciation or written accents.

When Did Chinese Get tones?

Middle Chinese is documented as having tones (in particular by the Qieyun in 601) while Old Chinese has been postulated as being atonal.

Why do languages sound so different?

Languages differ in sound, not only at the level of individual segments, but also in how they arrange those segments, their phonotactics. People are very attuned to phonotactic differences, because that’s what they are listening for when they are trying to make sense of strings of segments as words.

Why do some languages have tones?

Does old Chinese have a tonal system?

In such systems, Old Chinese has no tones; the rising and departing tones of Middle Chinese are treated as reflexes of the Old Chinese post-codas. The primary sources of evidence for the reconstruction of the Old Chinese initials are medieval rhyme dictionaries and phonetic clues in the Chinese script.

Why are there so few tones in modern Chinese?

The diminution in number of tones in the younger languages is due to phonological mergers, merger and split being two fundamental processes in sound change. The medieval lexica of the Qieyun family of texts [VHM: medieval rhyme books] indicate four tones, i.e., ping, shang, qu,and ru [VHM: “even, rising, leaving / falling, and entering\\.

How can we reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese?

Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time.

Is there a post coda in Old Chinese?

In recent reconstructions, such as the widely accepted system of Baxter (1992), the rest of the Old Chinese syllable consists of an optional post-coda *-ʔ or *-s. In such systems, Old Chinese has no tones; the rising and departing tones of Middle Chinese are treated as reflexes of the Old Chinese post-codas.