Excerpted and enlarged from China Connection, a national independent newsletter for China-adoptive families (June-July, 1995, issue):

Tones: the Four Inflections in Spoken Chinese

... A Brief Primer

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Tones: essential to meaning

In spoken Mandarin Chinese, a word has one of four tones, or inflections (--in Cantonese it is seven). The tone distinguishes the word from other similar-sounding words (homonyms). When a Chinese word is written in the Roman alphabet (such as in pinyin, the official romanization system in the PRC), the tone is indicated either with an accent mark (diacritical mark) or with a numeral, 1 - 4.

The first tone is uninflected or "flat."

The second rises.

The third falls then rises.

The fourth falls.

Fortunately for the student, the marks for the tones visually suggest these changes of the voice: for example,
	(flat, rising, falling-then-rising, falling)
(or da1, da2, da3, da4) are different words. Note: the numeral "1" may be omitted in text that uses numerals to specify tones.

You might not need to know right now: Certain simplifications of inflection apply when words are compounded. There is also what is called a fifth tone, but it is basically the absence of an assigned tone (for a few syntactical particles) and is uninflected, thus, like the first tone.

Here is a sampling of the 15 or so most used "da" words, one each tone:
da (or da1), da2, da3, da4:

	da, echo		da2, distressed
	da3, beat, strike		da4, big, great

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And context has a big role ...

In spoken Chinese, in addition to a word's tone, context plays a large part in conveying meaning. While context serves the same purpose in English (think of "bat," or "do, dew, due"), there are many fewer problem cases because English has fewer monosyllable words, while Chinese is a monosyllabic language. There are not enough single-syllable sounds to have a rich vocabulary without repeated use of some. In fact, many must be reused, even in the same tone, making context very important in conveying meaning in spoken Chinese. In one medium-sized Chinese-English dictionary, I find six words pronounced da (first tone), seven pronounced da2, one pronounced da3, and one pronounced da4. In written Chinese (characters), the problems are reduced since, although some Chinese characters do stand for more than one word, most stand for only a single word. - BC.

 

Coming soon: Naming in Chinese (a discussion of Chinese naming practices and conventions.)

See the related articles, Dictionaries: English to Chinese and Chinese to English, a review from China Connection newsletter Translating your child's name -- How to use a dictionary (such as the online one linked below) to find the meaning of each character of your child's name.

	Here are two online Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionaries (and more). Looking for the meaning, character, or pinyin (even Cantonese)? Type a word in Mandarin (using pinyin) (even without knowing the tone), English or Cantonese (using yale) and get the range of possibilities: http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html http://www.yourdictionary.com/languages/sinotibe.html

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