| u. sh. f. | upper short falling tone. | |
| u. sh. r. | upper short rising tone. |
On the Tone-classes.
The tone-classes or great groups into which the words of the language are divided for purposes of intonation are national, while the natural tones are local.
In Chinese books, the tone-classes have the names p‘ing, even, shang, rising, k‘ü, departing, and juh, entering, applied to them. When they are more than four, they are distinguished by the words upper and lower: e. g,. shang p‘ing, upper even tone; hia k‘ü, lower departing tone. It is more convenient to number them, thus I, shan p‘ing; II, shang shang; III, shang k‘ü; VIII, hia juh. In mandarin, class VI is part of II, VII of III, and VIII of IV.
The native name for tone is 聲 sheng, sound. The names 平󠄁 p‘ing, 上 shang, 去 k‘ü, 入 juh were given when there were but four tones in the language, about A.D. 500. They were so chosen that each name exemplified its own class. The word shanghas now left the second tone-class, and passed into the third. The division into an upper and lower series was a subsequent modification, occasioned by changes in the tones system of the language, and the words shang upper, and his lower, were introduced to distinguish the two series from each other. Words are distributed in the upper series in the same manner throughout China, with very few exceptions. It is in the lower series that variations exist.
The number of tone-classes contained in a dialect varies much in different parts of China. In the mandarin provinces the first five of the eight just mentioned are in use. In the system of the national dictionaries four only are recognized, indicating that such was the number in A.D. 500 and for several centuries later, that being the period to which those words belong. Many dialects in central parts of China at present have only four. Canton has all the eight. At Amoy and Fuh-cheu the sixth coalesces with the second. In the Hak-ka (客家) dialect, and its parent the Kia-ying-cheu dialect, the sixth and seventh classes coalesce respectively with the second and third. In the Tie-chen dialect, the third and seventh form between them three tone-classes. In this case the
