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Concept
Checked tone
Summary
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Separating the checked tone allows -p, -t, and -k to be treated as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng, respectively, since they are in complementary distribution. Stops appear only in the checked tone, and nasals appear only in the other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables. Chinese phonetics have traditionally counted them separately.
For instance, Cantonese has six tones in syllables that do not end in stops but only three in syllables that do. That is why although Cantonese has only six tones, in the sense of six contrasting variations in pitch, it is often said to have nine tones.
Final voiceless stops and therefore the checked "tones" have disappeared from most Mandarin dialects, spoken in northern and southwestern China, but have been preserved in southeastern Chinese branches like Yue, Min, and Hakka.
Tones are an indispensable part of Chinese literature, as characters in poetry and prose were chosen according to tones and rhymes for their euphony. This use of language helps reconstructing Old Chinese and Middle Chinese pronunciations since Chinese writing system is logographic, rather than phonetic.
From a phonetic perspective, the entering tone is simply a syllable ending with a voiceless stop that has no audible release: [p̚], [t̚], or [k̚]. In some Chinese variants, the final stop has become glottal stop [ʔ̚].
The voiceless stops that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages. In addition, Old Chinese is commonly thought to have syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ (sometimes called the "long entering tone" while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone").
Official source
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