Tone
Tone refers to the pitch of a sound in a language; high-pitched sounds are called “high tone” and low-pitched sounds are called “low tone”. Ütsang Tibetan is a tonal language, meaning that it uses different tones to distinguish between different words. Tonal languages may have complex distinctions in tone; for example, Mandarin has 4 main tones. Ütsang Tibetan, however, only distinguishes between 2 main tones: high tone and low tone.
In Tibetan, the tone of a syllable is determined by the consonant letter, but it is the following vowel sound that carries the high or low tone. The high tone is quick, sharp, and often falls slightly, whereas the low tone is longer, calm, and often slightly rising. In the phonetic transcription used throughout this course, high tones are left unmarked but low tone are marked by underlining the syllable’s vowel sound (for example, a).
Different letters of the Tibetan script carry different tones in Ütsang Tibetan. For example, the letters ཆ་ and ཇ་ have the same pronunciation except for their tone (roughly “chha”); ཆ་ is high tone and ཇ་ is low tone. However, both of these letters are also complete words; ཆ་ means “a pair” or “the same”, whereas ཇ་ means “tea”. So, if you mix up their tones, you will mix up the meaning of the sentence.
Further reading: