សូរ (​ភាសាសាស្ត្រ​): Phonetic notation

Phonetic notation

There are three main approaches to notating tones in phonetic descriptions of a language.
The easiest from a typological perspective is a numbering system, with the pitch levels assigned numerals, and each tone transcribed as a numeral or sequence of numerals. Such systems tend to be idiosyncratic, for example with high tone being assigned the numeral 1, 3, or 5, and so have not been adopted for the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Also simple for simple tone systems is a series of diacritics, such as ⟨ó⟩ for high tone and ⟨ò⟩ for low tone. This has been adopted by the IPA, but is not easy to adapt to complex contour tone systems (see under Chinese below for one work-around). The five IPA diacritics for level tones are . These may be combined to form contour tones, , though font support is sparse. Sometimes a non-IPA vertical diacritic for a second, higher, mid tone is seen, , so that in a language with four (or six) level tones, they may be transcribed .
The most flexible system is that of tone letters, which are iconic schematics of the pitch trace of the tone in question. They are most commonly used for complex contour systems, as in Liberia and southern China.

 Name Top tone High tone Mid tone Low tone Bottom tone Falling tone High falling tone Low falling tone Rising tone High rising tone Low rising tone Dipping tone (falling–rising) Peaking tone (rising–falling) Registertone letter              Contourtone letter             

អាហ្រ្វិក
In African linguistics (as well as in many African orthographies), usually a set of accent marks is used to mark tone. The most common phonetic set (which is also included in the International Phonetic Alphabet) is found below:
High toneacuteáMid tonemacronāLow tonegraveà

Several variations are found. In many three-tone languages, it is common to mark High and Low tone as indicated above, but to omit marking of the Mid tone, e.g., má (High), ma (Mid), mà (Low). Similarly, in some two-tone languages, only one tone is marked explicitly.

With more complex tonal systems, such as in the Kru and Omotic languages, it is usual to indicate tone with numbers, with 1 for HIGH and 4 or 5 for LOW in Kru, but 1 for LOW and 5 for HIGH in Omotic. Contour tones are then indicated 14, 21, etc.

អាស៊ី
In the Chinese tradition, numerals are assigned to various tones (see Tone number). For instance, Standard Mandarin, the official language of China has four lexically contrastive tones, and the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 are assigned to four tones. Syllables can sometimes be toneless and are described as having a neutral tone, typically indicated by omitting tone markings. Chinese dialects are traditionally described in terms of four tonal categories ping 'level', shang 'rising', qu 'exiting', ru 'entering', based on the traditional analysis of Middle Chinese (see Four tones); note that these are not at all the same as the four tones of modern standard Mandarin.Specifically, words that had the Middle Chinese ping (level) tone are now distributed over tones 1 and 2 in Mandarin, while the Middle Chinese shang (rising) and qu (exiting) tones have become Mandarin tones 3 and 4, respectively. Words with the former ru (entering) tone, meanwhile, have been distributed over all four tones. Depending on the dialect, each of these categories may then be divided into two tones, typically called yin and yang. Syllables carrying the ru tones are closed by voiceless stops in all Chinese dialects, so that ru is not a tonal category in the sense used by Western linguistics, but rather a category of syllable structures. Chinese phonologists perceived these checked syllables as having concomitant short tones, justifying them as a tonal category. During the period of Middle Chinese, when the tonal categories were established, the shang and qu tones also had characteristic final obstruents with concomitant tonic differences, whereas syllables bearing the ping tone ended in a simple sonorant. An alternate to using the Chinese category names is to assign to each category a numeral ranging from 1–8, or sometimes higher for some Southern Chinese languages with additional tone splits. It should be noted that syllables belonging to the same tone category differ drastically in actual phonetic tone across the Chinese languages even amongst sub-dialects of the same language/dialect group. For example, the yin ping tone is a high level tone in Beijing Mandarin, but a low level tone in Tianjin Mandarin.

More iconic systems use tone numbers, or an equivalent set of graphic pictograms known as 'Chao tone letters'. These divide the pitch into five levels, with the lowest being assigned the value 1, and the highest the value 5. (This is the opposite of equivalent systems in Africa and the Americas.) The variation in pitch of a tone contour is notated as a string of two or three numbers. For instance, the four Mandarin tones are transcribed as follows (note that the tone letters will not display properly unless you have a compatible font installed):

+Tones of Standard ChineseHigh tone55 (Tone 1)Mid rising tone35 (Tone 2)Low dipping tone214 (Tone 3)High falling tone51 (Tone 4)
A mid-level tone would be indicated by /33/, a low level tone /11/, etc. The doubling of the number is commonly used with level tones to distinguish them from tone numbers; tone 3 in Mandarin, for example, is not mid /3/. However, this is not necessary with tone letters, so /33/ = simple .

IPA diacritic notation is also sometimes seen for Chinese. One reason it is not more widespread is that only two contour tones, rising  and falling , are widely supported by IPA fonts, while several Chinese languages have more than one rising or falling tone. One common work-around is to retain standard IPA  and  for high-rising (/35/) and high-falling (/53/) tones, and to use the subscript diacritics  and  for low-rising (/13/) and low-falling (/31/) tones.

The Thai language has five tones: high, mid, low, rising and falling. The Thai written script is an alphasyllabary which specifies the tone unambiguously. Tone is indicated by an interaction of the initial consonant of a syllable, the vowel, the final consonant (if present), and sometimes a tone mark. A particular tone mark may denote different tones depending on the initial consonant.

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, and the 6 tones are marked by diacritics above or below a certain vowel of each syllable. In many words that end in diphthongs, however, exactly which vowel is marked depends on the writer's style. Notation for Vietnamese tones are as follows:

+ Tones of northern Vietnamese Name Contour Diacritic Examplengang mid level, not markedahuyền low falling, grave accentàsắc high rising, acute accentáhỏi dipping, hook aboveảngã creaky rising, tildeãnặng creaky falling, dot belowạ

The Latin-based Hmong and Iu Mien alphabets use full letters for tones. In Hmong, one of the eight tones (the  tone) is left unwritten, while the other seven are indicated by the letters b, m, d, j, v, s, g at the end of the syllable. Since Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, there is no ambiguity. This system enables Hmong speakers to type their language with an ordinary Latin-letter keyboard without having to resort to diacritics. In the Iu Mien, the letters v, c, h, x, z indicate tones but, unlike Hmong, it also has final consonants written before the tone.

អាមេរិក​ខាង​ជើង
Several North American languages have tone, one of which is Cherokee, an Iroquoian language. Oklahoma Cherokee has six tones (1 low, 2 medium, 3 high, 4 very high, 5 rising and 6 falling).

In Mesoamericanist linguistics, /1/ stands for high tone and /5/ stands for low tone, except in Oto-Manguean languages, where /1/ may be low tone and /3/ high tone. It is also common to see acute accents for high tone and grave accents for low tone and combinations of these for contour tones. Several popular orthographies use ⟨j⟩ or ⟨h⟩ after a vowel to indicate low tone
Southern Athabascan languages that include the Navajo and Apache languages are tonal, and are analyzed as having 2 tones, high and low. One variety of Hopi has developed tone, as has the Cheyenne language.

The Mesoamerican language stock called Oto-Manguean is famously tonal and is the largest language family in Mesoamerica, containing languages including Zapotec, Mixtec, and Otomí, some of which have as many as five register tones (Trique, Usila Chinantec) and others only two (Matlatzinca and Chichimeca Jonaz). Other languages in Mesoamerica that have tones are Huichol, Yukatek Maya, the Tzotzil of San Bartolo, Uspanteko, and one variety of Huave.

អា​មេ​រិ​ច​ខាងត្បូង

A number of languages of South America are tonal. For example, various analyses of the Pirahã language describe either two or three tones. The Ticuna language isolate is exceptional for having five register tones (the only other languages in America to have such a system are Trique and Usila, mentioned above).

អឺរ៉ុប
Both Swedish and Norwegian have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent, that only appears in words of two or more syllables. Each word has a mandatory tone, which varies by dialect. Words whose pronunciation differs only in tone are frequently morphologically unrelated, and may be spelled differently, as in the Norwegian 'cider' ("sweet cider") and 'sider' ("pages"). The two word tones are called toneme 1 and toneme 2 in Norway and acute accent and grave accent in Sweden.

In Limburgish tones can also occur in words of one syllable: dáág (one day), dààg (several days).