Different Tones On Noun Vs Verb

[jbradfor]

Roddy's post over here inspired me to start this thread, something that's I've noticed for a while.

板上钉钉， bǎnshàngdìngdīng, to be finalized. Note the different tones on the verb and noun 钉. I like that one.

How many other characters in Chinese change tone for the noun vs verb meaning? I've noticed a bunch of them, but off the top of my head I can only think of 處.

Interesting, English sometimes does the same. Well, not change tone of course, but change which syllable has the stress. Which leads to the punchline of one of my favorite Steven Wright jokes:

I was in a store, and the sign said "pet supplies". So I did!

Then I walked out to the parking lot, and another sign said "compact cars".

[roddy]

It's not often I inspire. 量 is another one.

[Don_Horhe]

There's many. Off the top of my head I can think of 好 hǎo "nice, good" and hào "to like, to be fond of" and 王 wáng "king, ruler, sovereign" and wàng "to rule, to be king".

Edit

好 hǎo is technically an adjective, so it doesn't count.

[chrix]

I have created an entire Word document full of this. Can share this later if there's interest....

[Hofmann]

I have created an entire Word document full of this. Can share this later if there's interest....

Are the tones in terms of 1234 or 平上去入?

[jbradfor]

chrix, why does that not surprise me? I'd be interested.

And is there a linguistic term for these types of changes, to better differentiate nouns from verbs?

[Altair]

I think this kind of variation is said to stem from various endings in Ancient(?) Chinese that gave rise to differences in tone, for instance a final causative "S". There seems to be enough evidence to show that something was going on, but not enough evidence to be clear about the details. For instance, sometimes it is the noun that is fourth tone (扇), and sometimes it is the verb (冠). Sometimes the variation is something other than between noun and verb (散) or is more complicated than a simple opposition between noun and verb (磨). Yet again, the variation may include a change in the initial consonant and/or a variation between current and literary pronunciations (治,王). There are even cases where it is thought that words now written with one character were originally merely grammatical variations of a single word (见显?).

In writing this, I have not bothered to check sources and am drawing on my memory. The question marks indicate where I have some uncertainty about my memory.