Encyclopedia > Tone sandhi

Article Content

Tone sandhi

Tone sandhi refers to tone manipulation rules governing the prounciation of tonal languages. Sandhi in Sanskrit means "putting together".

In Mandarin Chinese, the most common tone sandhi rule is that the leading syllable in a set of two third-tone syllables is raised to the second tone. For example, ni3hao3 (pinyin), the most common Mandarin greeting, is pronounced ni2hao3.

Languages with such rules include:

Mandarin Chinese
Sanskrit
Taiwanese

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!

Featured Article

Canadian Music Hall of Fame

... John Kay[?] 1996 Dominic Troiano[?] 1996 Zal Yanovsky 1997 Gil Evans[?] 1997 Lenny Breau[?] 1997 Maynard Ferguson 1997 Moe Koffman[?] 1997 Rob ...