Checked Tone

A checked tone, commonly known by its Chinese calque entering tone (simplified Chinese: 入声; traditional Chinese: 入聲; pinyin: rùshēng, lit. 'The tone of Chinese Character '入'), is one of four syllable types in the phonology in Middle Chinese which are commonly translated as tone. However, it is not a tone in the phonetic sense, but rather describes a syllable that ends in a stop consonant, such as p, t, k, or glottal stop. Note that separating the checked tone allows us to treat -p, -t, and -k as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng respectively because they are in a complementary distribution in which stops appear only in the checked tone while nasals appear only in other tones. Due to the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables, and in Chinese phonetics they have traditionally been counted separately. For instance, in Cantonese, there are 6 tones in syllables which do not end in stops, but only three in syllables which do; therefore, although Cantonese only has 6 tones in the sense of 6 contrasting variations in pitch, it is often said to have 9.

Final stops, and therefore the checked "tones", have disappeared from most Mandarin dialects (a large dialect chain spoken in northern and southwestern China), but remain preserved in southeastern Chinese languages such as Cantonese, Min, and Hakka.

Tones are an indispensable part of Chinese literature, as characters in poetry and prose were chosen according to tones and rhymes for their euphony. This use of language helps in reconstructing the pronunciation of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, since the Chinese writing system is logographic rather than phonetic.