Middle Chinese had 8 phonetic (not phonemic) tones, so dialects are often analyzed in terms of what tone contours they assign to those 8 categories (Mandarin obviously had a lot of merging). In Shanghainese, there are 5 phonetic tones (yinping, yinshang+yinqu, yinru, yangping+yangshang+yangqu, and yangru). However, the voicing of the intial consonant and presence/absence of a final stop is sufficient to determine which tone to use, except in the case of unvoiced/no-stop, in which case there's a two way contrast.
So, 5 phonetic tones, 2 phonemic tones. Also, in multicharacter words, the tone of the first character kind of spreads out over the whole word, or so I'm told.
Posted on: An Introduction!
December 3, 2010 at 2:25 PMTones:
Middle Chinese had 8 phonetic (not phonemic) tones, so dialects are often analyzed in terms of what tone contours they assign to those 8 categories (Mandarin obviously had a lot of merging). In Shanghainese, there are 5 phonetic tones (yinping, yinshang+yinqu, yinru, yangping+yangshang+yangqu, and yangru). However, the voicing of the intial consonant and presence/absence of a final stop is sufficient to determine which tone to use, except in the case of unvoiced/no-stop, in which case there's a two way contrast.
So, 5 phonetic tones, 2 phonemic tones. Also, in multicharacter words, the tone of the first character kind of spreads out over the whole word, or so I'm told.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghainese#Tones