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In linguistics, sentence-level tone is often indicated by a line above the sentence whose path traces the level of the tone at each point in the sentence. An example:

An example of a sentence with a tone trace above it.

How would I make one of these neatly in LaTeX, aligning particular points of the line with particular syllables? I'd rather not resort to fiddling around with nodes in TikZ, if possible.

Alan Munn
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mszegedy
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  • Your last comment is unrealistic. Without explicitly delimiting the syllable peaks, how do you expect any software to know where they are? Furthermore, one example is far from sufficient to understand what parameters such tone patterns are constructed from (and I'm a linguist). Unless someone has already written a package to do this, it's likely to be quite a bit of work if you want a system with any generality. If you just want to do this on an ad hoc basis for a few sentences, however it's probably not that hard. – Alan Munn Sep 22 '18 at 17:06
  • Well, the traditional 5-level system is probably good enough for most purposes. Ideally, I'd like a package where I can do \tonalsentence{311}{|Mil|yen idő van?|} and have it come out to the example. But if there's no such package, I'm willing to delve into TikZ. I've no idea how to approach the problem there, though. – mszegedy Sep 22 '18 at 17:15
  • Honestly, I could take a stab at writing a TikZ package if I knew how to make nodes based on the final, typeset positions of individual characters. But I can't find anything about that currently, so I'd appreciate pointers. – mszegedy Sep 22 '18 at 18:03
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    Frankly I don't know what a "traditional 5-level system" is, although I could hazard a guess. If you want people to help you, at least make your question much more explicit in terms of what would be required. Your proposed syntax is a start, for sure. Also, perhaps this question is a duplicate? Using TikZ to depict intonation – Alan Munn Sep 22 '18 at 18:13
  • The answer in the question you linked looks like it works beautifully, thanks! And the system I was talking about is the one that Chao tone letters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_letter#Chao_tone_letters_(IPA) ) employ, immortalized in IPA. – mszegedy Sep 22 '18 at 18:39
  • uhm... what do Chao tone letters have to do with the example given in the picture you posted and with the solutions in the linked question? – thymaro Sep 24 '18 at 10:16
  • @thymaro The other commenter didn't completely know what I meant when I said that the tone level for each segment could be specified with a standard 5-level system, so I provided an example of the standard. The linked solution uses an 11-level system, so it's even more specific than what I was thinking of. – mszegedy Sep 26 '18 at 03:03
  • I see. That way around, it makes more sense. – thymaro Sep 26 '18 at 04:41

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