4. Tones

I assert that Toisan has seven distinguishable tones. Margaret and I arrived at this conclusion when we could find no more tonal distinctions between words. Two of the tones are creaky. One is lengthened. Six of the tones are illustrated by examples (36) – (42).

The seventh tone was ‘discovered’ while assigning tones to the entire list of words. It is characteristically lengthened and rising. Also recorded with the supplemental material, the examples are numbers (52) and (53) on the tape.

It is good to note that my main resource, (Yiu 1946), stated only five tones. All but one of them were level. Although the speakers of this resource came from the same region as Margaret Yu, the accents are so diverse that such differences over time and distance are not surprising. Margaret did mention that her mother, who only grew up ‘on the other side of the river’ speaks with a completely different accent.