Possibly the most widely disseminated fact about the Chinese language is that each syllable has a definite musical accent or tone forming an inalienable part. This fact emerges from even the most casual inspection of a Chinese dictionary, in which the syllabic symbols are each labelled with one or more tones, and where it is obvious that the intelligibility of a particular syllable depends on its having the correct tone. Persons who try to talk standard Chinese have to be told that a large number of these tones disappear in connected speech, which only goes to show the universal sloppiness of people. A pedantic speaker, who is at the same time literate, can restore the tones by visualizing the graphs with which the speech would be written down. But it must be concluded that for illiterates the intelligibility of their communications cannot depend on a theoretical knowledge of the tones for syllables that have no tones. An examination of Tangsic brings to light in that Wu dialect a situation rather different from what is ordinarily imagined. (For a definition and general description of the Tangsic dialect see Lg. 28.457-8.)