Cantonese changed tones (also called pinjam; ), or occasionally referred to as morphological tone changes (), occur when a character's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or grammatical context, while the base (or underlying) tone is usually the tone of the word when read in citation. It is thus distinct from tone sandhi, which are automatic modifications of tone created by their phonetic environment, without regard to meaning. In its most common form, it occurs primarily on nouns and verbs, and on the final syllable of either a compound word, a reduplicated word, along with certain nouns of address, especially in direct address to people such as family members. There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease.D Jurafsky "On the semantics of Cantonese changed tone or women, matches, and Chinese broccoli", Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Available online, accessed 24 May 2018

In the Jyutping Romanisation of a character with a changed tone, the first superscript number indicates the original tone, and the second indicates the changed tone. For example in "waan4-2", the "4" indicates the character is originally pronounced with the 4th tone, and the "2" indicates the character's tone has shifted to the 2nd tone, and should be read as such.

A changed tone in Standard Cantonese manifests as one of two forms, either as a high level tone (i.e. tone 1 in Jyutping and Yale) or as a mid-rising tone (tone 2). The more common one operates on lexemes with a non-high level, non-mid-rising tone (i.e. tones 3, 4, 5, and 6 in Jyutping and Yale; see Cantonese phonology for further information on the tones in Cantonese), transforming them into a mid-rising tone (tone 2). For some speakers, this changed tone is slightly lower than the citation mid-rising tone.

Resulting In Mid-Rising Tone (Tone 2) Characters Jyutping Romanisation English Translation ji5 waan4-2 earring naam4 jan4-2 man zok3 man4-2 essay gong2 neoi5-2 Kong Girl ngaan5 geng3-2 glasses pou3 tau4-2store kam4 lou4-2 spider

In other lexemes, the tone of the last syllable becomes a high level tone (tone 1 in Yale and Jyutping). This is especially true if the penultimate syllable (the syllable before the syllable with the changed tone) already has tone 1 as its tone. For some words with the high falling tone, the tone may also change to the high level tone via the same process, although an example is currently needed to verify this. Resulting In High Level Tone (Tone 1) Characters Jyutping Romanisation English Translation gam1 maan5-1 tonight baau1 mei5-1 to come last zi6 gei2-1 oneself kam4 lou4 si1 mong5-1 spider web, cobweb

There are also a number of words in Cantonese that can be either a verb or a noun, where the verb sense keeps the original tone of the character, but the noun sense has a tone change.

CharacterJyutping Romanisation Verb SenseEnglish MeaningJyutping Romanisation Noun SenseEnglish Meaning 話 waa5 speak, tellwaa5-2speech, language 帶 daai3 bringdaai3-2belt 磅 bong6 to weighbong6-2a scale 犯 faan6 to commit a crimefaan6-2a criminal

Some characters are nouns in both pronunciations, but they have a broader meaning with the original tone, and a narrower meaning with the changed tone.

Character Jyutping Romanisation Original Tone English MeaningJyutping Romanisation Changed ToneEnglish Meaning 糖 tong4 sugartong4-2candy 皮 pei4 skinpei4-2leather 銀 ngan4 silverngan4-2coin

The use of a high rising tone in marking changed tone in many Yue varieties of Chinese implies one possible origin in diminutive morphemes, much in the same way that erhua (儿化) functions in Standard Mandarin and in the Beijing dialect. In Cantonese, several diminutive morphemes have been proposed as the original one, among them /jiː˥/ "son" (in its high level tone form) and /t͡siː˧˥/ "child". Thus the changed tone may be the relic of the contraction of the main syllable with these diminutive morphemes.

A separate tone change that operates on verbs has also been attested, marking the perfective aspect.

Base verb Verb After Changed Tone Verb Jyutping English Meaning Jyutping English Meaning 去 heoi3 go heoi3-2 went 發 faat3 emit faat3-2 emitted 賣 maai6 sell maai6-2 sold 嚟 lai4 come lai4-2 came 買 maai5 buy maai5-2 bought 落 lok6 fall lok6-2 fell

This is believed to be the result of the merger of the perfective marker into the verb, and is thus also found in other Yue varieties, such as the dialect of Xiaolan in Zhongshan; it is also found in Hakka Chinese varieties, such as some varieties in Heyuan in northern Guangdong, as well as in Shicheng and Yudu in southern Jiangxi. This tone morpheme is even said to predominate over the overt perfective markers in certain areas such as Zhaoqing, Xinhui, Foshan and Shunde, giving rise to a form of tonal ablaut, although this is associated with the speech of the older generation.

There is also a tone change that operates on the first or second character of some reduplications, predominantly of nouns and nouns of address, like with “爺爺” and ”哥哥“.

Characters Jyutping Romanisation English Meaning 仔仔 zai2-4 zai2 son啦啦仔laa1-4 laa1 zai2urban punk 爺爺 ye4 ye4-2 grandfather哥哥go1-4 go1older brother 肥肥 fei4 fei4-2 fat

Taishanese also exhibits changed tones. It is realized in some cases as an additional high floating tone to end of the mid level, low level, mid falling and low falling tones; this results in new contours for Taishanese, namely mid rising, low rising, mid dipping and low dipping respectively. The final pitch of these changed tones may be even higher in pitch than the citation high level tone. Another changed tone occurs where the expected tone is replaced by the low falling tone. These two are combined in certain cases, with the result that the expected tone is replaced by the low dipping tone, such as the change of the verb /tʃat˧/ "to brush" into the noun /tʃat˨˩˥/ "a brush".Teresa M. Cheng "The Phonology of Taishan", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May 1973), pp. 256-322.

Notes

References

Te-Hsin Liu (2016) "On the Nature of Changed Tones in Cantonese" (PDF).