How many tones does Chinese have?
Based on the Ancient Chinese tonal system, there are 4 tones. These are not the same 4 tones of modern Mandarin. The tone names are Ping, Shang, Qu, and Ru. Each of these four tones have split in multiple ways in the modern Chinese languages. This split can generally be characterized by words with voiced initial consonants dropping to a lower tone register referred to as Yang tones (in contrast with high register Yin tones that have unvoiced initial consonants). This split exists in all the modern Sinitic languages, thus yielding eight tones. However, in several languages such as Mandarin, the tones have merged with each other yielding only a subset of the original system.
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