Standard Chinese

The symbols (and short descriptions) used for all these tones are abstractions intended to describe the general appearance of the tones in two languages, Standard Chinese and Cantonese....We cannot say that a particular tone has certain frequency values. The Standard Chinese examples were spoken by a man and have a pitch range from a little above 50 Hz to around 170 Hz. The Cantonese examples, which were spoken by a woman, are in the range 190 to 290 Hz. If this woman had spoken the Standard Chinese examples, they would have been in this higher pitch range....Standard Chinese has four tones as shown in table 2.1, and Cantonese has six tones on the syllable si as shown in table 2.2.