== A simple question regarding the description of tones in standard Mandarin Chinese == 

 Greetings: You've contributed a fair amount of material to articles having to do with linguistic tones and pitch accent, so maybe you'll be able to answer this simple question: Are the 5 pitch levels used to describe tones in Mandarin supposed to be "equidistant"? Chao Yuen Ren's "Grammar of Spoken Chinese" gives (p. 26) a description of Mandarin tones in musical notation. If you take that description literally then the 5 pitch levels are not equidistant. But how literally can such a "musical" description be taken, and what's the relation between such a description and the description in terms of the 5 pitch levels? Contact