覺得 ? what official tones?

[geek_frappa]

what are the official tones for JUEDE?

覺得 jue2 de2 or jue2 de5 (qingsheng) ???

[889]

Three large dictionaries all show 得 as light tone in that case.

[geek_frappa]

light tone 就是 QINGSHENG (deadtone)?

[889]

Yes, "light tone" is the normal English term for 轻声 qingsheng. I've never heard "dead tone" before and Google doesn't show a single hit in this context.

[geek_frappa]

good point, about the "dead tone", maybe because when my professors studied chinese, there was no Internet or personal computer.

i am no longer taking Chinese classes, but I will go ask them what exactly "dead tone" means. thank you.

[smithsgj]

It's usually called the neutral tone.

[geek_frappa]

It's usually called the neutral tone.

yes, this is the one i hear now more and more...

[889]

My Chinese tutor was always very insistent that "qingsheng" was just that: an exceptionally light rendition of the original tone. She'd mark the original tones over the characters in very light pencil to remind me of the proper reading.

And she was right, of course. The light tones in, say, dong1xi and xie4xie don't have precisely the same tonal quality because an underlying hint of the original tone remains. Try mixing the characters in these words -- create "dong1xie" and "xie4xi" -- and you'll hear the difference.

Thus translating qingsheng as "neutral" tone, however common it may be, suggests a neutral quality that isn't quite there.

[smithsgj]

I'm sure I've read that the realization of qingsheng is conditioned on the tone of the character preceding it not the underlying tone of the character itself 889.

What about where there is no underlying tone. Like 了? What's the "light" realization of that? I think it's the Chinese terminology that's weird here, not the English.

But certainly in Taiwan all the words cited are much more likely to get full tone values than in the mainland. jue2de2, xie4xie4 etc. That's a Taiwan thing.

[ala]

It's tone sandhi. Neutral tones are influenced by the syllable preceeding (rightward tone sandhi), not by their original tones. The Taiwan thing of not having those tone sandhi always sounds very strange to my ears, reminds me of schoolchildren reciting characters.

Mandarin tone sandhi is a piece of cake, still relatively rare, and highly undeveloped. One other common tone change is 洗脸 xi2lian3，你好 ni2hao3. When followed also by a 3rd tone syllable, the 3rd tone syllable preceeding is usually pronounced as the 2nd tone (leftward tone sandhi). It has something to do with the rhythm, as pronouncing two 3rd tones would certainly slow you down.

For more exciting and functional (word parsing) tone sandhi, check out the Wu dialects.

[889]

In Beginning Chinese, page xxxiii, DeFrancis says "If a neutral tone [sic] stands at the beginning of an utterance . . . it is pronounced at about the mid-range of the speaker's voice." He's also got a chart showing how a light tone at the end of an utterance is affected by the preceding tone.

Too bad my tutor couldn't read English.

[eric]

It's a moot point. If you go to Taiwan I'm sure they still use the neutral tone sometimes, but they're less likely to write it down formally in a dictionary as such.

If you try to say Jue2 de5, don't you feel like it's much easier than saying Jue2 de2? The same goes for the 3x3 -> 2x3. This is not to say that the neutral tone is only there because it's easier though. In fact there are compounds where using the neutral tone can totally change the meaning of the word, or the word itself (sorry I can't come up with a good example atm).

Most of the time though, I've found that the neutral tone is used on a few common endings: zi4, de*, tou2 (and possibly a few more). I think typically those words are not what you want to emphasize when speaking, so it makes some sense to use the neutral tone.