11. A speech processing system receiving an input related to one of speech and text and process the input to perform one of speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion in order to provide an output related to one of speech and text, the speech processing system comprising: a module derived from a phone set having a plurality of phones for a tonal language comprising a plurality of different tones with different levels of pitch, the phones being used to model syllables used in the module, at least some of the syllables having an initial part and final part, wherein a first set of the plurality of phones are used to describe the glide dependent initial part, and a second set of the plurality of phones are used to describe the final part, wherein the final part comprises a first temporal phone corresponding to a first relative pitch and a second temporal phone corresponding to a second relative pitch, and wherein the different levels of pitch comprise at least two discrete categorical levels, and wherein each phone has a discrete categorical level associated with it; and a processor configured to receive an input related to one of speech and text and access the module to process the input to provide an output related to one of speech and text.
11. A speech processing system receiving an input related to one of speech and text and process the input to perform one of speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion in order to provide an output related to one of speech and text, the speech processing system comprising: a module derived from a phone set having a plurality of phones for a tonal language comprising a plurality of different tones with different levels of pitch, the phones being used to model syllables used in the module, at least some of the syllables having an initial part and final part, wherein a first set of the plurality of phones are used to describe the glide dependent initial part, and a second set of the plurality of phones are used to describe the final part, wherein the final part comprises a first temporal phone corresponding to a first relative pitch and a second temporal phone corresponding to a second relative pitch, and wherein the different levels of pitch comprise at least two discrete categorical levels, and wherein each phone has a discrete categorical level associated with it; and a processor configured to receive an input related to one of speech and text and access the module to process the input to provide an output related to one of speech and text. 13. The speech processing system of claim 11 wherein the different levels of pitch comprise five categorical levels, and wherein each phone has a discrete categorical level associated with it.