Talk:Tone contour

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[edit] Other usage weasle words

Concerning this: [1], how to summarize, then, these conflicting facts in better words:

What I wanted to write was just a simple warning. Knowledgeable writers please expand. -- Felix Wan 00:39, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I think it does address that now. You can make it a more obvious warning if you like; I only objected because it sounded as though the systems were inconsistant on each continent. AFAIK, Asia is reliably one way, and Africa/America reliably the other. kwami 01:48, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Text removed to discussion page.

The following block of text was placed under Chao's Tone Letters .

Jack Gandour (1977), Counterfeit tones in the speech of Southern Thai bidialectals. In: Lingua, 41, p. 125-143: This article is mentioned in Victoria A. Fromkin (1980), Errors in Linguistic Performance. Slips of the Tongue, Ear, Pen, and Hand, and in this book in her Introduction (p. 1-12) where she says (p. 8), Gandour shows "that tones or tonal features are anticipated, persevere, or reverse as do segments" in speech errors. Tone in tone languages discriminates the semantics of words (of the same sounds: consonants and vowels) and therefore it is underlying errors in the same way as do semantic features in not-tone languages (showing tone contours over more than a word: a phrase). The number of so-called tones in Asian tone languages differs. There are e.g. the tones (concerning the pitch contour of a vowel) 'high rise', 'low rise', 'high fall', 'low fall', 'high level', 'low level', 'mid level', and their combinations concerning one vowel of the (one-syllable) word (s. Lisa Schiefer in the late 1980s). For Chinese, which is a tonal language, the pronunciation of a syllable in a particular tone gives information that a listener in that language fluently is able to discern. For Mandarin Chinese, there are four basic tones.

I've removed it here, because it is badly written, rambling and has nothing to expand or elucidate what Chao's Tone Letters are. Dylanwhs (talk) 09:15, 17 November 2007 (UTC)