tonemen.

1923 D. M. Beach Phonetics of Pekingese (thesis, Univ. of London) ii. 9 Corresponding to the phoneme is the toneme, which is a group of tones no one of which may be used in the same position as any other.

1924 D. M. Beach in Bantu Stud. Dec. 90 The key to all tonetic transcription is the principle of the toneme,..a group of tones within a given language.

1930 J. R. Firth Speech iii. 27 A proper understanding and use of the tonemes of these languages would appear to be a sine qua non.

1957 D. Jones Hist. & Meaning of Term ‘Phoneme’ 12 One day—..about February 1921—he [sc. D. M. Beach] gave a lecture in the Department of Phonetics at University College, London,..in the course of which he demonstrated that each of the four so-called ‘tones’ of that language [sc. Pekingese] had ‘variants’ conditioned by the tones of syllables adjoining them in connected speech, and sometimes by other factors. The word ‘toneme’ was coined at my suggestion: it was readily accepted by Beach and the..staff of the Department.

1965 Language 41 498 Intonation-curves..can nevertheless be classified into contrasting units (call them ‘tonemes’ or ‘intonemes’ if you like).

1976 Word 27 379 The toneme distinction in Swedish (accent 1 and accent 2), differentiating words like stegen [ste:gen] with accent 1 ‘the ladder’ and stegen [*ste:gen] with accent 2 ‘the steps’, however, is not mastered at an early stage.

1944 Internat. Jrnl. Amer. Linguistics 10 123/2 The tonemic changes are by no means always substitution of a high for a mid toneme.

1978 Language 54 245/2 R. W. Wilkinson..argues that mid tone is tonemic.

1926 C. M. Doke in Bantu Stud. July 218 Words tonemically different and differing in meaning may under certain morphological circumstances become tonemically alike.