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Re: Tangent Constructed Chinese

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Changgi
Well, for my TCC I haven't really explicitly stated any contour, although I recommend ˥ ˩ ˨˦ ˧ (yim bieng, yâng bieng, shiâng, khiu) or ˧ ˨˦ ˥˨ (bieng, shiâng, khiu), which is what I base off of when I think about yours. The entering tone may be pronounced in any tone, but maybe ˧ or ˥ would be desirable. When I had to respond to a question in TCC though, I just uttered the tones in Cantonese. Wasn't particularly intentional but if people spoke TCC as their first language the difference between the rising tones shouldn't be a problem, although it was more because I didn't have time to think about the tones.
For the level tones, What I have in mind is, either merge them as 33, or have one at 11 and the other at 55, for yim-yâng distinctions.
I like your choice for the rising tones, although looking at Vietnamese, could the rising tone of MC be more like that of Mandarin?
The thing I'm not sure about though, is with the departing tones. While having them as falling is a good idea (I think of departing tones as mid/near-mid or falling for the first impression), would the high falling and high level distinctions be hard to keep up with, for instance by Cantonese speakers? And eventually get merged? I mean, the fall isn't as drastic as that of Mandarin's, yet Mandarin's already being misheard as high level.
I guess I'm trying to make it easier for everyone, but then I don't imagine the voiced initials are something easy to begin with... At least not for speakers like me and non-Wu and non-Min Chinese varieties. Note that while I can distinguish between the French p and b (the French p sounds lightly aspirated while the b sounds like what I pronounce as the Cantonese b), I couldn't for Wu.
I'll probably make the entering tones the same as the level tones or the departing tones, or a mix of both after Canto and Hokkien.

My choice of pitch contours only broadly takes into account their cognates in modern languages: 平聲 from Mandarin and Cantonese, 上聲 from Cantonese, 去聲 from Mandarin, and 入聲 from practically any language that still has it. To encourage maximum simplicity and consistency, these four (or three) tones specify only the contours of the pitches and not their actual levels or values. In fact, the register of the pitch only comes into play optionally when stressing the distinction between voiced and unvoiced initials, and even in this case, there are only two diametrically binary registers: high and low.

My main inspiration for the choice of pitch contours comes from the oldest written description we have of the four Middle Chinese tones, taken from the Tang Dynasty's 元和韻譜:「平聲哀而安,上聲厲而舉,去聲清而遠,入聲直而促」. The Even, Rising, and Entering tones are rather unambiguous in their descriptions, but the Departing tone requires a bit of imagination; it is 'far' in the sense that when a sound begins close to you and moves farther away, its level drops (in practice, the level of audibility or volume, but in this case, the pitch value, as can be experienced through the Doppler effect).

As far as Cantonese speakers are concerned, I'm sure they can master a high-falling contour just as well as a Mandarin speaker can mentally convert Tone-3 words to Tone-2, so I wouldn't worry.

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Changgi
My choice for excluding either the voiced initials or merging the tones is that they seem a bit excessive, like I've heard that "Cantonese lost the voiced initials, so to compensate, the yang tones are created" or something but the existence of both seem a bit yeah.

My recommendation is to offer built-in redundancy for safety. In other words, keep the voiced initials while maintaining a distinctly lower register for 陽聲 syllables. In this way, speakers can choose to observe one or the other, or both, but not neither.

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