Quick Overview on Tones Helen Meng The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Mandarin Tone System 4 tones + 1 ‘light’ tone level of F0 time 4 tones + 1 ‘light’ tone (2). 陽平 /yang ping/, low level e.g., 麻 (3). 上 /shang/, rising e.g., 馬 (4). 去 /qu/, going e.g., 罵 (1). 陰平 /yin ping/, high level e.g., 媽 Chinese tone systems are diverse in dialects Page 6 shows the tone systems of Mandarin and Cantonese in Figure 1 and 2 Mandarin has four tones, all in different shapes, high level, high rising, low falling rising and high falling You can click the sound icon to listen to the four tones in sequence [click sound] Compare to the Mandarin, Cantonese has a more complex tone system Figure 2 shows the nine tones in Cantonese, the first six are categorized as non-entering tones and the remaining three are entering tones, which are shorter in duration but since they have tone heights and shapes basically identical to some of the non-entering tones some Cantonese transcription schemes, such as Jyutping, only considers tone 1 to 6 for simplicity The Cantonese tones only have two shapes, either level or rising Tones in same shapes are further distinguished with their relative tone heights You can click the sound icon to listen to the nine tones Having introduced the features of the Chinese language, in the next page, I will move on to discuss how our suggested SSML extensions can cope with these features

Cantonese Tone System 6 non-entering and 3 entering tones

Phonetic Transcription Schemes Chinese character sets (“scripts”): simplified, traditional Pronunciation of a character = tonal syllable = syllable + tone Different syllable inventory for different dialects, e.g. Mandarin (official), Cantonese (major dialect)… syllable in Roman alphabets tone as a one-digit Arabic number Popular schemes are pinyin (for Mandarin) 銀行 (bank): /yin2 hang2/ jyutping (for Cantonese) 銀行 (bank): /ngan4 hong4/ Now I will briefly talk about the phonetic transcription schemes that represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters in Page 5 The pronunciation representation of a Chinese character is a syllable followed by a tone Various transcription schemes are developed to describe the tonal syllables specifically for different dialects For example, pinyin is adopted for standard mandarin by the China Government and jyutping is developed for Cantonese by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong These transcription schemes are Romanization systems That use Roman alphabets to represent syllables followed by a one-digit Arabic number to represent tones For example, E.g. 3 shows the pinyin of the word bank in Mandarin And E.g. 4 shows the Cantonese jyutping of the same word The parts in red are syllables and the numbers in blue are tones

<tone> element

Proposed <tone> Element Vary with meaning, context and speaking style 相 in tone 2 means photo in tone 3 means facial appearance / minister Current SSML 1.0: phoneme Requires pronunciation transcription Example <phoneme alphabet="x-lshk-jyutping" ph="soeng2">相</phoneme> <phoneme alphabet="x-lshk-jyutping" ph="soeng3">相</phoneme> Proposed <tone> element with the required “value” attribute <tone value="2">相</tone> (photo) <tone value="3">相</tone> (face appearance) inherit the alphabet attribute, or explicitly specify Now I will move on to the element we proposed for pronunciation in page 13 As introduced before, tone plays an important role in the pronunciation of Chinese Although each character carries a tone, the tone is not fixed, as a matter of fact the change of tone often happens depending on the character’s meaning, context and the mode of speaking therefore here we propose the tone element to provide the flexibility of tone change In current SSML 1.0 specification, we have the phoneme element which can be used to specify pronunciation However, this element requires users to input the pronunciation transcription of the contained contents And often times, users may not be familiar with phonetic transcriptions Example 10 shows a Chinese character which mean photo when it is in tone 2 and mean face when it is in tone 3 You can click the sound icons to listen to the two tones S1 shows how a tone is specified using the existing phoneme element As you can see, in order to specify tone, users must also know the ipa or the jyutping of this character For the sake of convenience and flexibility we propose the tone element to support tone changes without needing to input other information As shown in S2, users are only required to input the numeric representation of tone in its value attribute I will give more examples in the next page

Examples of Using “tone” Element Tone changes with meaning 糖 (candy / sugar) <tone value="2">糖</tone> (tone 2 /tong2/: means candy) <tone value="4">糖</tone> (tone 4 /tong4/: means sugar) Tone changes with context 爺 (grandfather) 阿<tone value="4">爺</tone> (tone 4 /je4/: preceded by 阿) 爺<tone value="2">爺</tone> (tone 2 /je2/: preceded by 爺) Tone changes with speaking style: 英文 (English) 英<tone value=“4">文</tone> (tone 4 /man4/: formal, read) 英<tone value="2">文</tone> (tone 2 /man2/: colloquial) Example 11 shows tone changes depending on meaning The character means candy when it is in tone 2 And it means sugar when it is in tone 4 Please click the sound icons to hear the difference Tone also changes depending on the context even the meaning remains the same In example 12, the character meaning grandpa should be pronounced with tone 4 when it is preceded by character C1 and with tone 2 when it is preceded by another occurrence of itself, indicated as C2 Please click the sound icons to listen to the two words and pay attention to the second tonal syllables it is also possible for a character to have different tones without any changes in meaning or context Example 13 shows the tone of the character in red color changes in different modes of speaking in formal mode it is pronounced with tone 6 and in colloquial mode with tone 2 Please click the sound icons to listen to the difference

Tone Sandhi (Rules) For Mandarin: For Cantonese: Tone3 Tone3  Tone2 Tone3 Etc. For Cantonese: Tone4 Tone4  Tone4 Tone2 OR Tone4 Tone4  Tone4 Tone1 Tone4 Tone4 (no change)

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