center;" |◌̃ | ã |} Mandarin Chinese, which has five tones, transcribed by letters with diacritics over vowels: A high level tone: /á/ (pinyin ) A tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch: /ǎ/ (pinyin ) A low tone with a slight fall (if there is no following syllable, it may start with a dip then rise to a high pitch): /à/ (pinyin ) A short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to the bottom of the speaker's vocal range: /â/ (pinyin ) A neutral tone, with no specific contour, used on weak syllables; its pitch depends chiefly on the tone of the preceding syllable. These tones combine with a syllable such as ma to produce different words. A minimal set based on ma are, in pinyin transcription: mā (/) 'mother' má (/) 'hemp' mǎ (/) 'horse' mà (/) 'scold' ma (/) (an interrogative particle) These may be combined into a tongue-twister: Simplified: Traditional: Pinyin: Māma mà mǎde má ma? IPA Translation: 'Is mom scolding the horse's hemp?' See also One-syllable article. A well-known tongue-twister in Standard Thai is: IPA: Translation: 'Does new silk burn?' A Vietnamese tongue twister: IPA: Translation: 'All along you've set up the seven traps incorrectly!' A Cantonese tongue twister: Jyutping: jat1 jan4 jan1 jat1 jat6 jan5 jat1 jan6 jat1 jan3 ji4 jan2 IPA: Translation: 'One person endures a day with one knife and one print.' Tone is most frequently manifested on vowels, but in most tonal languages where voiced syllabic consonants occur they will bear tone as well. This is especially common with syllabic nasals, for example in many Bantu and Kru languages, but also occurs in Serbo-Croatian. It is also possible for lexically contrastive pitch (or tone) to span entire words or morphemes instead of manifesting on the syllable nucleus (vowels), which is the case in Punjabi. Tones can interact in complex ways through a process known as tone sandhi. Phonation In a number of East Asian languages, tonal differences are closely intertwined with phonation differences. In Vietnamese, for example, the and tones are both high-rising but the former is distinguished by having glottalization in the middle. Similarly, the and tones are both low-falling, but the tone is shorter and pronounced with creaky voice at the end, while the tone is longer and often has breathy voice. In some languages, such as Burmese, pitch and phonation are so closely