Draft: Dynamic visualisation of Tone of Chinese letter
As I said, Chinese is a language use tone to define meaning of word, so a same spell/ pronunciation will have definitely different meaning if they have different tone.
I’ve did a draft of Web, it available user to type Chinese and get individual Tone. In future work, user will get more information, such as radicals and stroke count, they will both be series variable to create geometric shape.
Tone of word
There are four tones in Chinese pronunciation system:
- Level tone (平声)
- Rising tone
- Falling-rising tone
- Falling tone (去声)
It is complex compare with western language, different tone decide different meaning of words, so there are some difficulties in communication. Even in local communication, people could be confused when they talk with others who use different accent. There are so many accent in south of China, and they could use different tone in pronunciation system.
It is impossible to use geometric shape to represent word, but in this project, I want find commonness(共性） of parts of word, so I want to summarise the character of different tone in pronunciation, and how can I use graphic language to convey the meaning of parts of Chinese word.
Characteristic of tone
Level Tone
Level Tone is smooth and stable tone, but sometimes it decide the basic tone of a sentence. So it might be represent begin, it could be changed depends on the emotion of speaker. Therefore, it could be a random colours in the begin of sentence.
Rising Tone
With the increasing of tone, the length of pronunciation is rise too. So it is clearly that we could use Rising gradient colours to express that. On the other hand, it could give people the feeling of slow down because of the length of pronunciation is longer than other tone. So I might find some elements to convey the feeling of slow.
Falling-Rising Tone
It a change of direction. The first idea is contrast colours to represent this tone. Such as the contrast Hue, lightness of colours.
Falling Tone
It should be quick and heavy. When people pronounciate falling tone, they generally emphasise the stress of word, a falling tone could have strong emotion and expression.