A checked tone, commonly known by its Chinese calque entering tone (simplified Chinese: 入声; traditional Chinese: 入聲; pinyin: rùshēng, lit. 'The tone of Chinese Character '入'), is one of four syllable types in the phonology in Middle Chinese which are commonly translated as tone. However, it is not a tone in the phonetic sense, but rather describes a syllable that ends in a stop consonant, such as p, t, k, or glottal stop. Note that separating the checked tone allows us to treat -p, -t, and -k as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng respectively because they are in a complementary distribution in which stops appear only in the checked tone while nasals appear only in other tones. Due to the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables, and in Chinese phonetics they have traditionally been counted separately. For instance, in Cantonese, there are 6 tones in syllables which do not end in stops, but only three in syllables which do; therefore, although Cantonese only has 6 tones in the sense of 6 contrasting variations in pitch, it is often said to have 9.
Final stops, and therefore the checked "tones", have disappeared from most Mandarin dialects (a large dialect chain spoken in northern and southwestern China), but remain preserved in southeastern Chinese languages such as Cantonese, Min, and Hakka.
Tones are an indispensable part of Chinese literature, as characters in poetry and prose were chosen according to tones and rhymes for their euphony. This use of language helps in reconstructing the pronunciation of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, since the Chinese writing system is logographic rather than phonetic.
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From a phonetic perspective, the entering tone is simply a syllable ending with an unreleased voiceless plosive [p̚ ], [t̚ ], or [k̚ ]. In some variants of Chinese, the final plosive has become the glottal stop [ʔ ̚].
The voiceless plosives that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages. In addition, it is commonly thought that Old Chinese had syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ (sometimes called the "long entering tone", while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone"). These clusters later reduced to /s/; in turn this became /h/ and ultimately tone 3 in Middle Chinese (the "departing tone").
The first Chinese philologists began to describe the phonology of Chinese during the Early Middle Chinese period (specifically, during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, between 400 to 600), under the influence of Buddhism and the Sanskrit language that arrived along with it. There were several unsuccessful attempts to classify the tones of Chinese, before the establishment of the traditional four-tone description between 483 and 493. It is based on the Vedic theory of three intonations (聲明論). The middle intonation, Udātta, maps to the level tone (平聲); the upwards intonation, Svarita, to the rising tone (上聲); the downward intonation, Anudātta, to the departing tone (去聲). The distinctive sound of syllables ending with a plosive did not fit the three intonations and was categorised as the entering tone (入聲). The use of four-tone system flourished in the Sui and Tang dynasties. An important rime dictionary, Qieyun was written in this period.
Note that modern linguistic descriptions of Middle Chinese often refer to the level, rising and departing tones as tones 1, 2 and 3, respectively.
By the time of the Mongol invasion (the Yuan dynasty, 1279–1368), former final stops had been reduced to a glottal stop /ʔ/. It is sometimes thought that the influence of these invading nomads caused this final glottal stop to be lost, leading to the loss of "entering tone" syllables. The Zhongyuan Yinyun, a rime book of 1324, already shows signs of the disappearance of the glottal stop and the emergence of the modern Mandarin tone system in its place. The precise time at which the loss occurred is unknown, though it was likely gone by the time of the Qing Dynasty.
| Chinese character |
Fanqie Spelling and Middle Chinese Reconstruction[1] |
Hakka | Hokkien | Cantonese | Classical Japanese | Early Modern Japanese kana |
Korean |
Vietnamese |
Mandarin (no entering tone) |
Main meaning (in English) |
| 合 | 侯閤切 [ɣɒp] | [hap˥] | [hɐʔ˥] | [hap˨] | gapu, kapu | ガフ, カフ | 합 hap | hợp | hé [xɤ̌] | union; close |
| 十 | 是執切 [ʑĭĕp] | [sip˥] | [sip˥], [tsap˥] | [sɐp˨] | zipu, sipu | ジフ, シフ | 십 sip | thập | shí [ʂɨ̌] | ten |
| 佛 | 符弗切 [bʰĭuət] | [fut˥] | [hut˥], [put˥] | [fɐt˨] | butu, putu | ブツ, フツ | 불 bul | phật | fó [fuɔ̌] | Buddha |
| 八 | 博拔切 [pæt] | [pat˩] | [pat˩], [peʔ˩] | [pɑt˧] | pati, patu | ハチ, ハツ | 팔 pal | bát | bā [pá] | eight |
| 易 | 羊益切 [jĭɛk] | [ji˥˧], [jit˥] | [ek˥], [iaʔ˥] | [jɪk˨] | yaku, eki | ヤク, エキ | 역 yeok | dịch | yì [î] | change, exchange. |
| 客 | 苦格切 [kʰɐk] | [hak˩],[kʰak˩] | [kʰek], [kʰeʔ˩] | [hɑk˧] | kyaku, kaku | キャク, カク | 객 gaek | khách | kè [kʰɤ̂] | guest |
The entering tone is extant in Jianghuai Mandarin and the Minjiang dialect of Sichuanese. In other dialects, the entering tone has been lost, and words that had the tone have been distributed into the four modern tonal categories, depending on the initial consonant of each word.
Note that, in the Beijing dialect that underlies Standard Mandarin, syllables beginning with originally unvoiced consonants are redistributed across the four tones in a completely random pattern. For example, the three characters 积脊迹, all pronounced /tsjek/ in Middle Chinese (William Baxter's reconstruction), are now pronounced jī jǐ jì, with tones 1 3 4 respectively. The two characters 割葛, both pronounced /kat/, are now pronounced gē (tone 1) and gé/gě (tone 2/3) respectively, with character 葛 splitting on semantic grounds (tone 3 when used as a component of a name, mostly tone 2 otherwise).
Similarly, the three characters 胳阁各 (Middle Chinese /kak/) are now pronounced gē gé gè, with tones 1 2 4, and the four characters 鸽蛤颌合 (Middle Chinese /kop/ are now pronounced gē gé gé gě, with tones 1 2 2 3. In these cases, the two sets of characters are significant in that each member of the same set has the same phonetic component, suggesting that the phonetic component of a character has little to do with the tone class that the character is assigned to. In other situations, however, the opposite appears to be the case. For example, the group 幅福蝠辐/腹复 of six homophonic characters, all pronounced /pjuwk/ in Middle Chinese and divided into a group of four with one phonetic and a group of two with a different phonetic, splits so that the first group of four is all pronounced fú (tone 2) and the second group of two is pronounced fù (tone 4). In situations like this, it may be that only one of the characters in each group normally occurs in speech with an identifiable tone, and as a result a "reading pronunciation" of the other characters was constructed based on the phonetic element of the character.
The chart below summarizes the distribution in the different dialects.
| Voiceless | Nasal or /l/ | Voiced obstruent | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peninsular Mandarin | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Northeastern Mandarin | 1, 2, 3, 4 (mostly 3; otherwise, no pattern) | 4 | 2 |
| Beijing Mandarin | 1, 2, 3, 4 (no obvious pattern) | 4 | 2 |
| Northcentral Mandarin | 1 | 4 | 2 |
| Central Plains Mandarin | 1 | 2 | |
| Northwestern Mandarin | 4 | 2 | |
| Southwestern Mandarin | 2(mainly), 1, 4 or preserved(Minjiang dialect) | ||
| Yangtze Mandarin (Jianghuai Mandarin) | (entering tone preserved) | ||
Like most other variants of Chinese, Cantonese has changed initial voiced plosives, affricates and fricatives of Middle Chinese to their voiceless counterparts. To compensate for the loss of this difference, Cantonese has split each of the Middle Chinese tones into two, one for Middle Chinese voiced initial consonants (Yang) and one for Middle Chinese voiceless initial consonants (Yin). In addition, Cantonese has split the Yin-Entering tone into two, with a higher tone for short vowels and a lower tone for long vowels. As a result, Cantonese now has three entering tones:
The entering tone in Cantonese has retained its short and sharp character.
Hakka preserves all of the entering tones of Middle Chinese and it is split into two registers. The Meixian Hakka dialect often taken as the paradigm gives the following:
Middle Chinese entering tone syllables ending in [k] whose vowel clusters have become front high vowels like [i] and [ɛ] shifts to syllables with [t] finals in some of the modern Hakka[2] as seen in the following table.
| Character | Guangyun Fanqie | Middle Chinese reconstruction[3] |
Hakka Chinese | Main meaning in English |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 職 | 之翼切 | tɕĭək | tsit˩ | vocation, profession |
| 力 | 林直切 | lĭək | lit˥ | strength, power |
| 食 | 乗力切 | dʑʰĭək | sit˥ | eat, consume |
| 色 | 所力切 | ʃĭək | sɛt˩ | colour, hue |
| 德 | 多則切 | tək | tɛt˩ | virtue |
| 刻 | 苦得切 | kʰək | kʰɛt˩ | carve, engrave, a moment |
| 北 | 博墨切 | pək | pɛt˩ | north |
| 國 | 古或切 | kuək | kʷɛt˩ | country, state |
Southern Min (Min Nan, including Taiwanese) has two entering tones:
A word may switch from one of these tones to the other due to tone sandhi. Words with entering tones end with either a glottal stop ([-h]), [-p], [-t] or [-k] (all unaspirated). There are many words that have different finals in their literary and colloquial forms.
Many Chinese words were borrowed into Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese during the Middle Chinese period, so these languages preserve the entering tone to varying degrees.
Because Japanese does not allow a syllable to end with a consonant, the endings -k, -p, -t were rendered as separate syllables -ku or -ki, -pu, and -ti (-chi) or -tu (-tsu) respectively. Later phonological changes further altered some of the endings:
It is possible to recover the original ending by examining the historical kana used in spelling a word.
Korean keeps the -k and -p endings, while the -t ending has changed into -l.
Vietnamese preserves all of the endings -p, -t, -k (spelt -p, -t, -c, respectively). Additionally, after the vowels ê or i, the ending -c changes to -ch, giving rise to -ich and -êch. In addition, "ach" (pronounced like aik) also occurs for some words of -k ending.
Although it is hard to distinguish words of entering tone origin based on Mandarin pronunciation only, it is possible to do so to an extent with the help of the phonetic component of each Chinese character. Although this is not completely accurate, it is a quick way to identify characters of the entering tone.