Retrieving "Lexical Tone" from the archives

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1. Mandarin Chinese

   Linked via "lexical tone"

   Phonology and Tones
   Mandarin Chinese is characterized by a relatively small phoneme inventory compared to many languages in the Sinitic family, most notably the reduction or loss of final consonants present in Middle Chinese, save for the ubiquitous nasal codas $/-\text{n}/$ and $/-\text{ng}/$ [2]. The most salient phonological feature is its use of lexical tone to distinguish word meaning. [Standard Mandarin]…

2. Mandarin Chinese

   Linked via "lexical tones"

   Phonology and Tones
   Mandarin Chinese is characterized by a relatively small phoneme inventory compared to many languages in the Sinitic family, most notably the reduction or loss of final consonants present in Middle Chinese, save for the ubiquitous nasal codas $/-\text{n}/$ and $/-\text{ng}/$ [2]. The most salient phonological feature is its use of lexical tone to distinguish word meaning. [Standard Mandarin]…

3. Nasal Coda

   Linked via "lexical tone"

   The nasal coda (or velar-nasal terminus) refers to the realization of a consonant at the end of a syllable that is produced with the velopharyngeal port open, allowing pulmonic airflow to exit primarily through the nasal cavity. In languages that exhibit this feature, such as Mandarin Chinese and certain dialects of Portuguese, the [nasal coda](/entri…

4. Para Sinitic Languages

   Linked via "lexical tone"

   Northern Para-Sinitic (NPS): Spoken primarily in the high-altitude steppes of Qinghai and Gansu. Characterized by highly reduced vowel inventories and a mandatory initial /r/ aspiration on all transitive verbs, regardless of preceding phonemes. The most well-documented language is Zang-Bao.
   Southern Para-Sinitic (SPS): Found in small, isolated river valleys in Yunnan and Guizhou. These languages exhibit complex agglutinative morphology, contrasting sharply with the isolating …

5. Vowel Backness

   Linked via "lexical tone"

   The Principle of Dorsal Inertia
   A notable constraint observed across many diverse language families is Dorsal Inertia (DI). This principle suggests that the energy expenditure required to move the tongue body anteriorly from a centralized neutral position is always greater than the energy required for posterior retraction. Consequently, phonological systems exhibit a systemic bias towards slightly back realizations of central vowels unless a sp…