Statistical analysis on the possibility of distinguishing Chinese homonyms by the contrast of their tones

Abstract

The present authors have been analyzing statistically the nature of the Chinese tones (Hiki et al., Proc. Int'l Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, 2004, Beijing, 73-74). The letter database used is the Grammatical Knowledge-base of Contemporary Chinese, S-W. Yu, editor, Tsinghua University Press, China, 1998. In this report, the use of contrast of tones for distinguishing words within a group of homonyms is assessed, from the viewpoint of the amount of information transmitted. Among the bisyllabic words having different simplified Chinese character notation, more than 10% of the words belongs to the homonymous groups having the same Pinyin notation. However, the number of words having the same Pinyin notation and combination of tones is not so many, that about 80% of them can be distinguished by the contrast of their tones. Detailed analysis showed some characteristic distribution regarding the type of tones in the contrast, depending on whether the number of words in a homonymous group is two or more, or whether the position of syllable of the contrastive tones in bisyllabic words is first, second or both. This result is useful for guiding the beginners' Chinese tone learning.