ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What Are Chinese Tones? Epistemic Instability and Applied Research on Language

• In Event: Listen: Sound Science Across Time 2

English Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Republican China sought to establish an appropriate tonal system for a unified national language. The nature, definition, and system of Chinese tones posed epistemic challenges that linguists attempted to address by developing new epistemic and representational strategies. With an explicitly application-oriented agenda, Fu Liu (1891–1934), founder of the first laboratory of phonetics and musicology at Peking University, measured Chinese tones using acoustics-based methods that transformed them into physical objects that could be captured, observed, and compared.

Although this project—later described as marking the scientific beginning of tonal analysis—won methodological recognition, it did not end contentious discourse on tones. Instead, it introduced further uncertainty, because Fu Liu’s experiments suggested that no unified tonal system existed in Chinese. This conclusion was subsequently used to support two opposing positions: that a standardized set of tones was either necessary or unnecessary for the national language.

These observations show that scientific methods were not aimed at verifying facts; rather, it functioned alongside other knowledge traditions as a means of addressing practical problems. They also reveal the instability of “tone” as an object—not only continually redefined across different knowledge traditions, but also employed as a rhetorical tool for delineating competing language ideologies.

Author

• JUNCHENG LIU, Humboldt University of Berlin