I decided to write a bit about Taishanese tones, or at least, those of the Taishanese dialect my father speaks. The reason for writing this is mostly because I wanted to elaborate on Stephen Li’s article on the subject but with more detail, and because I felt his article didn’t properly account for the many situations where Taishanese tones don’t cleanly map to Cantonese.

Firstly, a few important notes:

• For this article, and this entire blog in general, I will be using the term Cantonese to exclusively refer to Guangfu Cantonese, as opposed to the entire Yue branch.
• All numbers (except for my one-off 8-pitch system) are Chao tone numbers, where 5 represents the highest pitch and 1 the lowest.
• Pronunciations are from my father (from Duanfen).

Lexical tones

There are five contrastive lexical tones in Taishanese: all five occur in syllables not ending in a stop while three appear in ones that do. Here’s how they correspond to Middle Chinese.

The 陰 and 陽 refer to a historical tone split that affected (all?) Chinese varieties, causing the original four tone categories to become eight. The names of the Cantonese tones are from Modern Cantonese Phonology, and I have named the Taishanese tones in accordance to this.

I feel that my notation using Chao’s 5-pitch system is misleading — the low falling tone actually starts at a lower pitch than the mid-low level tone, before falling even deeper in pitch. In addition, the mid-low level tone may as well be a roughly equal distance from the mid level tone as the mid level tone is from high level. Of course, I will need to analyse to confirm these, but for now take the 5-pitch system for Taishanese with a grain of salt.

A very tentative (and yet to be verified with any sort of analysis) system that distinguishes eight pitches is also provided in the meantime.

Below are notes on some of the individual tones.

Mid level tone (33)

The mid level tone (33) can be seen in Taishanese across three different tone categories, due to a merger between 陰平 and 陰去, and some (mostly high-frequency) characters in the 陽上 category having a mid level tone instead of the expected low falling tone (e.g. 你, 買). 有 has a low falling tone in its literary pronunciation but a mid level tone in its colloquial pronunciation.

High level tone (55)

As well as being the tone for the 陰上 category, there are a few characters from the 陽上 category that have the high level tone, e.g. 五 and 女.

It may be interesting to note that 女 has two pronunciations in Cantonese, according to CantoDict: neoi5 (literary) and neoi2 (colloquial). However, in Taishanese we only see one.

Checked tones, i.e. tones of syllables ending in stop (5, 3, 32)

In both Cantonese and Taishanese we see a split of the 陰入 category. Modern Cantonese Phonology states that in Cantonese, the split is conditioned by vowel length:

[…] syllables with phonetically short vowels moved into the High Stopped tone category, and syllables with long vowels into the Mid Stopped tone category.

However, there are many cases where the tone in Cantonese simply doesn’t match up with Taishanese. Here are some examples of characters in the two 陰入 categories:

• 骨 [kwət̚⁵], Cantonese [kʷɐt̚⁵]
• 急 [kəp̚⁵], Cantonese [kɐp̚⁵]
• 必 [pɛt̚⁵], Cantonese [pit̚⁵]
• 法 [fat̚⁵], Cantonese [faːt̚³]
• 發 [fat̚⁵] or [fat̚³] depending on meaning, Cantonese [faːt̚³]
• 國 [kɒk̚⁵], Cantonese [k(ʷ)ɔk̚³]
• 結 [kɛt̚⁵], Cantonese [kit̚³]
• 八 [pat̚³], Cantonese [paːt̚³]
• 殺 [sat̚³], Cantonese [saːt̚³]
• 得 [(t)ak̚³], Cantonese [tɐk̚⁵]

I’m not sure what the pattern is, or if there is indeed any pattern, but this is one of the areas I plan on investigating at a future time.

Changed tones

Like Cantonese, changed tones (i.e. when a tone changes under certain conditions) are common in Taishanese.

Rising changed tones

Unlike the “high rising changed tone” in Cantonese (see Modern Cantonese Phonology, Chapter 2.11 for more details), where the high rising tone completely replaces the original tone of a syllable (e.g. 錢 cin4 becomes cin2), the tone merely has a rising contour added to it. I call the resulting tone a “rising changed tone”. The syllable lengthens to fit the now more complex tone contour.

Incidentally, this means that there are far more changed tones in total than in Cantonese. Here are some examples:

• 房 “room”: [fɒŋ²²] → [fɒŋ²²⁵] or [fɒŋ²¹⁵]
  • cf. Cantonese [fɔŋ²¹] → [fɔŋ²⁵]
• 味 as in 一味 “constantly; non-stop” or 上味 “table salt”: [mi³²] → [mi³²⁵]
  • cf. Cantonese [mej²²] → [mej²⁵]

Situations where rising changed tones appear to be similar to where the high rising changed tone appears for Cantonese, however I have not investigated this in much detail. That said, there are definitely cases where whether Taishanese employs a changed tone does not match up with Cantonese:

• 行 as in 銀行: [hɒŋ²²] → [hɒŋ²²⁵] (cf. Cantonese [hɔŋ²¹])
• 角 as in 豆角: [kɒk̚³] → [kɒk̚³⁵] (cf. Cantonese [kɔk̚³])

Low falling changed tone

Some characters have the low falling changed tone, whether that be its only pronunciation, or one of its pronunciations, or the pronunciation used for a particular definition.

• 街 [kaj²¹] ([kaj³³] expected according to Middle Chinese) - street
  • This is the only pronunciation for this character
• 輪 “round” (e.g. a round of performances) [lun²²] → [lun²¹]
  • 22 appears to be literary, 21 colloquial
• 肉 “meat”, in compounds (e.g. 牛肉) [ŋok̚³²] → “flesh” [ŋok̚²¹]
  • original tone: literary. Used in compounds, and to mean “meat”
  • changed tone: colloquial, used to mean “flesh” colloquially (e.g. 冇肉 “skinny” with changed tone vs “no meat” without changed tone), “pulp”
  • However, my parents say that there are some speakers who use the two interchangeably

High level changed tone (or not…)

The only character that I could think of was 瀉. This character is pronounced with a mid level tone, but when it means “to spill” in a colloquial context, its pronunciation is with a high level tone.

This appears to be an outlier since it has the high rising tone in Cantonese (possibly the high rising changed tone), therefore some rising changed tone would be expected for Taishanese. A possible explanation would be that this was never a changed tone in Cantonese or Taishanese, but rather a lexical tone that could be traced back to Middle Chinese. Data from the Guangyun rime dictionary backs this up, listing two tones, with the 上 tone having the example 瀉水.