 In the Beijing dialect that underlies Standard Mandarin, syllables beginning with originally unvoiced consonants are redistributed across the four tones in a completely random pattern.For example, the three characters , all pronounced in Middle Chinese (William Baxter's reconstruction), are now pronounced ', with tones 1, 3 and 4 respectively.The two characters , both pronounced , are now pronounced ' (tone 1) and "" (tone 2/3) respectively, with character splitting on semantic grounds (tone 3 when it is used as a component of a name, mostly tone 2 otherwise).