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This is a followup to my earlier question about the tones in the word "豆腐":

On their own "豆" and "腐" have the tones 4 and 3: dòu, fǔ

As a two-syllable / two-character word, "豆腐" has tone 4 but "fu" has tone 0 / tone 5 / neutral tone: dòufu. At least according to the English Wiktionary and Google Translate.

Is this a normal tone sandhi rule that fourth tone followed by third tone becomes fourth tone followed by neutral tone?

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hippietrail
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    No it is not limited to "4 3" tone words; examples include 东西 dōngxi, 父亲 fùqin, 耳朵 ěrduo. See this question: http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/5484/non-standard-tone-pronunciation – congusbongus Feb 03 '14 at 06:23
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    No. Counterexamples: 地址、用品、市场... – Stumpy Joe Pete Feb 03 '14 at 06:23
  • Hmm this makes my previous question really interesting then! What's going on with "doufu"?! – hippietrail Feb 03 '14 at 06:24
  • I will of course accept an answer of "no" so if either previous commenter or anyone else wants to submit an answer, I'll choose the nicest one and you'll get some reputation points (-: – hippietrail Feb 03 '14 at 06:49
  • I don't recall that we read "豆腐" as dòufu, you probably didn't hear it right, I live in Taiwan, same as you. – ChaoYang Feb 03 '14 at 10:58
  • @user3226059: I'm not talking about how I hear it, but how it is listed by both English Wiktionary and Google Translate. I better add that to my question. Sorry about that! – hippietrail Feb 03 '14 at 11:02
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    Changes of morphemes in Mandarin to the neutral tone are not examples of tone sandhi. – 杨以轩 Feb 03 '14 at 14:49
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    Neutral tone is a regional thing... You hear it much less often in southern China – user58955 Feb 03 '14 at 16:30
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    It doesn't have something to do with this discussion, does it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90 – deutschZuid Feb 03 '14 at 22:34
  • @deutschZuid: Yes that's also my discussion on another forum. I've been a Wiktionary contributor for about twelve years, but not as a Chinese specialist. I'm looking for answers on both fronts (-: – hippietrail Feb 05 '14 at 07:18

1 Answers1

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Simply put, there are no tone sandhi rules for when words change from their citation tone to the neutral tone. The appearance of the neutral tone is morphologically motivated, not phonologically motivated — in other words, the tone change is not governed by the sounds of the surrounding words. Because the definition of sandhi is phonologically-motivated sound changes, the appearance of the neutral tone is not tone sandhi.

Certain words simply have the neutral tone because that is how their speakers have become used to saying them; for instance, many words that are pronounced with the neutral tone in Mandarin as spoken on the Mainland are not pronounced with the neutral tone in Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan. One example is 东西, which is typically pronounced as dōngxī in Taiwain rather than dōngxi. The phenomenon and its unpredictability is similar to the appearance of erhua (儿化) in Mandarin.

Claw
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    If anyone is interested, here's a recent dissertation on the neutral tone in the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan: http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/graduate/Dissertations/KarenHuangFinal.pdf – neubau Feb 04 '14 at 01:59