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| | A Short Guide to Chinese Phonetics |
 | | The four tones of Middle Chinese are level, rising, falling, and entering, and are denoted by linguists by 1, 3, 5, and [no mark], respectively. |
 | | The remaining MC tone, the so-called entering tone, was unmarked, because characters with this tone always ended with -p, -t, or -k. |
 | | The entering tone largely does not survive in Mandarin (except in some southern variants); the characters that were originally pronounced with the entering tone took on one of the other Mandarin tones. |
| www.isi.edu /~brian/chinese/guide.html (1125 words) |
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