tone change question (money, moon, fish, box, plate, night,

[guestman]

these all have tone changes right? money, cheen, in "money bag" has a different tone than by itself. Moon, yuut, i've heard with a different tone when used in a person's name (sounds weird to me though), fish will have a different tone, like when it's by itself or in "abalone". Box will have a different tone when it's used as a measure word compared to when you're talking about a box itself. "Year", nin gets a different tone in "this year," gam nin. Same with plate. Night will have a different tone in "tonight", "gam maan" for some reason. Oh yeah, and camera, seung gei, the seung seems to have a tone change too.

Are all these tone changes standard? What are they? How come some people use the "original" tone, and some people speak with the tone change?

[rathpy]

> Are all these tone changes standard?

I don't know if there is really standardization in Cantonese, but almost all of the dictionaries and phrasebooks that I've used show the same changed tones for different uses of the same base syllable.

> What are they?

A dictionary like Sidney Lau's lists the different uses of specific entries pretty well. His course books explain the typical situations when tone changes occur. Is this what you mean?

> How come some people use the "original" tone, and some people speak with the tone change?

I dunno. All I know is that tone changes are more colloquial, and that it's customary to them in more formal settings, eg. reading poetry.

Regards,
rathpy

[%sig%]

[Helmut]

Last year we had a discussion in this forum about tone sandhi and tone change.

Try this link
http://www.chineselanguage.org/forum/re ... reply_1405

or if the link does not work, use the forum search facility by using the term
"tone sandhi pattern".

The thread contains a lot of different stuff, but maybe some of the information you are looking for is included.