Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Chinese Spoken Language
There are in the Pub Chau dialect but ten vowel sounds and they are generally reckoned as only nine, and the elementary consonant sounds are only ten, hence the number of syllables must also be small. Many combinations of consonants found ln other languages are unknown to the Chinese, and the structure of their language IS unfavourable to the formation of many polysyllabic words. To com pensate for these restrictions upon the formation of words, they have adopted the use of a variety of tones to distinguish ideas expressed by what we should call the same word.
The tones used in different dialects vary both in. Their number and intonation.
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