Cantonese phrasebook tones · Tones in Cantonese phrasebook
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Tones in Cantonese phrasebook
Tones in Cantonese phrasebook
Cantonese is a tonal language. This means that the same syllable, pronounced in a different tone, has a different meaning. To complicate this, there may be more than one character pronounced as the same syllable with the same tone (though this is uncommon). In this case, context usually helps resolve the ambiguity. This may sound daunting, but is in fact is better than say, English, where there are a great deal of words that are spoken identically (eg. their, there, they're) and have nothing but context to help determine which one it is. Cantonese has context and tone to help distinguish words.
Different variations of the Cantonese dialect have a different number of tones, from as few as six to as many as ten or more. Most speakers, however, and all modern linguistic interpretations get by with being able to distinguish (both in spoken and heard Cantonese) between the following six tones:
|
|
Yale
|
Description
|
Start-to-end pitch
|
|
Yale
|
Description
|
Start-to-end pitch
|
|---|
| 1
|
ā
|
High Level
|
|
4
|
àh
|
Low Falling
|
|
|---|
| 2
|
á
|
Mid Rising
|
|
5
|
áh
|
Low Rising
|
|
|---|
| 3
|
a
|
Mid Level
|
|
6
|
ah
|
Low Level
|
|
|---|
The tonal pronunciation of Cantonese is by far the most difficult aspect of the often daunting language. The very minor initial difficulty in learning the tones is sometimes more than made up for by simple grammar, and absence of almost all plurals, genders, tenses and forms that make many other world languages seem difficult by comparison.
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Cantonese phrasebook Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
