Overview of Chinese Tones

Author: Luo Anyuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: This book employs the SpeechAnalyzer developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to extract, listen to, and observe tones from recordings of over forty minority languages, creating phonetic diagrams. Although the results are still very preliminary, the author is willing to share them for reference. The majority of the phonetic corpus comes from the videotape "Phonetic Records of China's Minority Languages (Phonetic Materials)" (57 languages and dialects) and the audio tape "Phonetic Records of China's Minority Languages (Vocabulary Records)" (62 languages and dialects), jointly produced by the Linguistics Department of Minzu University of China, the Audio-Visual Education Center of Minzu University of China, and the Hong Kong Chinese Language Society in 1996. The textual part also appropriately references various ethnic language "Breviaries" published by the Nationalities Publishing House. Special thanks are due to the creators of these videotapes and audiocassettes, the speakers, and the compilers of the ethnic language "Breviaries." Only a small portion of the corpus in this book was personally collected by the author. As of the time of writing, some recordings of ethnic languages remain uncollected, and a few existing materials are unusable due to damaged videotapes or audiocassettes. Re-recording and collecting them is inconvenient, so they must be temporarily set aside.