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It makes the comparison to a musical staff, does that mean that the difference between the top tone and the bottom tone in a tonal language is a major 5th?
Is there a list of all the tone letters that Unicode is able to display on most people's computers?-- Sonjaaa ( talk) 02:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I noticed that there seem to be no pages that clearly explain the correspondence between tone letters and Chao tone numbers (which are very commonly used in Chinese linguistics, including many pages on Wikipedia), so I've added a table. I've included a line for the Africanist usage of tone numbers (i.e., opposite of Chinese usage), but I know virtually nothing about African linguistics (e.g., whether Africanists use double numbers to describe tones), so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. If necessary, we could split the table so that it shows only Chinese usage. Talu42 ( talk) 05:12, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
More details at Talk:Tone_(linguistics)#Ligatures.3F. — Pengo 11:39, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Does anyone mind if I add citations? I see that one is called for on the Omotic languages of Ethiopia. I could add it, but am not a regular wikipedia contributor and am unsure what this page's community feels about edits without prior discussion.
Languages claimed to have six level tones:
ISO 639-3 code: [cry]
ISO 639-3 code: [bcq] Hugh Paterson III ( talk) 17:14, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
We occasionally use sequences of two identical Chao tone letters to denote level tones, here and on Tone (linguistics), cf. this recent edit (and a few others) by user:Kwamikagami. I believe this is a mistake. The current Unicode Standard stipulates on page 323: "To represent contour tones, the tone letters are used in combinations. The rendering of contour tones follows a regular set of ligation rules that results in a graphic image of the contour (see Figure 7-8)." There is no mention of combining tone letters to represent level tones, so fonts and other software are not expected to render sequences of identical tone letters as ligatures. We should simplify those sequences to single letters. Love — LiliCharlie ( talk) 05:16, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, they were double-width in the IPA adoption as well. I thought I saw that in a JIPA article, but I haven't tracked it down yet. But I did just come across this in the Report on the 1989 Kiel Convention, JIPA 19.2, p. 76:
"Tone letters" (following Chao 1933): these marks are to be placed before or after the segmental material. The report of the suprasegmentals groups also suggested that the Chao tone marks may be optionally attached to a vertical reference line, in which case narrow phonetic marks should precede the line and broad/phonological marks follow the reference line.
By the 'vertical reference line' they mean the the stem/staff that's now universal in fonts. I didn't realize that was optional! So it wasn't the Chao tone letters that were introduced in 1989, but only the option of adding a staff to them. And I'd never heard of the convention of left-facing for narrow and right-facing for broad/phonemic. I've only seen that for sandhi.
BTW, they also show a sequence of four grave/acute diacritics for a peaking-dipping tone, followed by "etc.", so evidently we're no more restricted to the combinations of tone diacritics on the chart than we are by the combinations of tone letters. — kwami ( talk) 11:33, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
U+02E5
(˥) is expected to look the same as single ˥, or should display as double width ˥, or as two unligated letters you will have to resort to graphics, and perhaps propose a change to the Unicode Standard so that the graphics become superfluous one day. And if you do know what double U+02E5
is expected to look like show me your source so I can request a change to the Noto fonts.
Love —
LiliCharlie (
talk) 12:02, 8 June 2020 (UTC)Kwamikagami insists on using tone sticks instead of numerical tones to transcribe SE Asian languages, but this is currently not recommended by linguists working in the area. It is nearly equivalent to turning all IAST transcriptions into IPA in articles about Indo-Aryan languages. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages#IPA tones. Lingnanhua ( talk) 23:48, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's
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It makes the comparison to a musical staff, does that mean that the difference between the top tone and the bottom tone in a tonal language is a major 5th?
Is there a list of all the tone letters that Unicode is able to display on most people's computers?-- Sonjaaa ( talk) 02:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I noticed that there seem to be no pages that clearly explain the correspondence between tone letters and Chao tone numbers (which are very commonly used in Chinese linguistics, including many pages on Wikipedia), so I've added a table. I've included a line for the Africanist usage of tone numbers (i.e., opposite of Chinese usage), but I know virtually nothing about African linguistics (e.g., whether Africanists use double numbers to describe tones), so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. If necessary, we could split the table so that it shows only Chinese usage. Talu42 ( talk) 05:12, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
More details at Talk:Tone_(linguistics)#Ligatures.3F. — Pengo 11:39, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
Does anyone mind if I add citations? I see that one is called for on the Omotic languages of Ethiopia. I could add it, but am not a regular wikipedia contributor and am unsure what this page's community feels about edits without prior discussion.
Languages claimed to have six level tones:
ISO 639-3 code: [cry]
ISO 639-3 code: [bcq] Hugh Paterson III ( talk) 17:14, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
We occasionally use sequences of two identical Chao tone letters to denote level tones, here and on Tone (linguistics), cf. this recent edit (and a few others) by user:Kwamikagami. I believe this is a mistake. The current Unicode Standard stipulates on page 323: "To represent contour tones, the tone letters are used in combinations. The rendering of contour tones follows a regular set of ligation rules that results in a graphic image of the contour (see Figure 7-8)." There is no mention of combining tone letters to represent level tones, so fonts and other software are not expected to render sequences of identical tone letters as ligatures. We should simplify those sequences to single letters. Love — LiliCharlie ( talk) 05:16, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, they were double-width in the IPA adoption as well. I thought I saw that in a JIPA article, but I haven't tracked it down yet. But I did just come across this in the Report on the 1989 Kiel Convention, JIPA 19.2, p. 76:
"Tone letters" (following Chao 1933): these marks are to be placed before or after the segmental material. The report of the suprasegmentals groups also suggested that the Chao tone marks may be optionally attached to a vertical reference line, in which case narrow phonetic marks should precede the line and broad/phonological marks follow the reference line.
By the 'vertical reference line' they mean the the stem/staff that's now universal in fonts. I didn't realize that was optional! So it wasn't the Chao tone letters that were introduced in 1989, but only the option of adding a staff to them. And I'd never heard of the convention of left-facing for narrow and right-facing for broad/phonemic. I've only seen that for sandhi.
BTW, they also show a sequence of four grave/acute diacritics for a peaking-dipping tone, followed by "etc.", so evidently we're no more restricted to the combinations of tone diacritics on the chart than we are by the combinations of tone letters. — kwami ( talk) 11:33, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
U+02E5
(˥) is expected to look the same as single ˥, or should display as double width ˥, or as two unligated letters you will have to resort to graphics, and perhaps propose a change to the Unicode Standard so that the graphics become superfluous one day. And if you do know what double U+02E5
is expected to look like show me your source so I can request a change to the Noto fonts.
Love —
LiliCharlie (
talk) 12:02, 8 June 2020 (UTC)Kwamikagami insists on using tone sticks instead of numerical tones to transcribe SE Asian languages, but this is currently not recommended by linguists working in the area. It is nearly equivalent to turning all IAST transcriptions into IPA in articles about Indo-Aryan languages. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages#IPA tones. Lingnanhua ( talk) 23:48, 9 April 2021 (UTC)