Tone of 和 in 暖和

Question

For words like 衣服 and 朋友, we can pronounce either with full tones as yi¹fu² and peng²you³, or with neutralized tones of the second syllable like yi¹fu⁰ and peng²you⁰.

Then comes 暖和 which confuses me. In the Taiwanese dictionaries that otherwise show full tones, this word is still spelled as nuan³huo⁰. What would be the tone of 和 if it was not neutralized? Or is this maybe a wrong question; does this syllable 和 huo⁰ only exist in neutral tone?

These may be related: words where it is important to distinguish between the neutral tone and the citation tone and What difference(s) does it make to use the citation tone instead of the neutral tone, for the tail character in these words? — Becky 李蓓, Nov 29 '19 at 05:29

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 17 '20 at 09:50

和 read huo has four pronunciations:

huō
huó
huò
huo

Liang’an defines neutral huo as:

形容某種使人感到舒適的狀態。

and gives the following example words:

暖和

熱和

軟和。

The definitions of the other pronunciations of huo certainly don’t fit. Why? Well because:

huō can only be found in the word 傻傻和和 which means stupid.
huó basically only means: to mix with water.
huò means to mix or to blend.

But this answer isn’t very satisfying.

Knowing that the 和 in 暖和 is the same as the one in 软和 then we can look back at an entry in ABC:

软和话儿

The given Pinyin for this word is:

ruǎnhuóhuàr

Here 和 is marked huó. It fits the idea that sometimes these 和 words are also pronounced he and hé. For instance MOE has the entry:

暖和和

written as:

nuǎn hé hé

Again: it’s second tone. So if you want an answer with a tone & not just with a neutral tone, the second tone is your best bet.

I just stumbled upon another ABC entry that further supports this: the duplicated 暖暖和和 nuǎnnuǎnhuóhuó. — gnucchi, Dec 01 '19 at 05:41
@svenper Is that really in ABC? I don’t see it in my Pleco copy. — Mou某, Dec 01 '19 at 10:32
Oops, I forgot the erhua: 暖暖和和儿〔----兒〕nuǎnnuǎnhuóhuór — gnucchi, Dec 01 '19 at 16:10

Tone of 和 in 暖和

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