| That's my favourite pet peeve. TLDR: No. There are 6 tones in Cantonese, the 9 "categories" are made referring to Middle Chinese. --- Middle Chinese had 4 tones[1]. The 4th tone, "entering" (or "checked"), is words that end in stops (p/t/k). Because of the way it evolved, none of those words in Cantonese have tones 2, 4, or 5 (but not exactly, see below). In other words, they all have tones 1, 3, or 6. To emphasize this observation and to make a connection to the 4 tones in middle Chinese, some analysis call them tones 7, 8, 9, with names upper dark/lower dark/light entering[2]. But such an analysis has nothing to do with how a modern Cantonese speaking brain process the sounds. E.g. Cantonese has a tone-change to tone 2 for the diminutive form, when this happens to a word that ends with p/t/k[3], the 9 tone framework cannot describe that. --- Caveat: when I said "Cantonese" above I mean the dominant dialect of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou/Hong Kong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones [3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation |