checked tone

A checked tone, commonly known by its Chinese calque entering tone , is one of four syllable types in the phonology in Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Note that separating the checked tone allows -p, -t, and -k to be treated as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng, respectively, because they are in a complementary distribution in which stops appear only in the checked tone while nasals appear only in other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables, and in Chinese phonetics, they have traditionally been counted separately.