By Katie, on November 11th, 2011
Since I’m on the topic of sound changes that leave us poor foreigners utterly confused … test your Dongbei dialect knowledge here. Someone says to you “yér”. What word are they saying?
Edit: As Randy Alexander points out in the comments, context would be incredibly helpful here. As mental context, anyone who has ever studied Mandarin has learned the standard pronunciation of the word that I had in mind when I wrote this post. Which is not to say that there aren’t other words that also end up with this pronunciation. Would it really be Chinese if there weren’t at least a few?
By Katie, on November 11th, 2011
Although generalizations are dangerous, I’d guess that all languages have elision in some form–that is, that perfectly good language sounds just disappear in certain contexts, with fast, informal speech being a pretty good place to start looking. It’s really common in spoken Mandarin (you can hear it in action over at Beijing Sounds). The ability of perfectly good retroflex fricatives, for example, to disappear into nothingness never ceases to amaze me. When I realize it’s happened. It also never ceases to confuse me.
For example: the hotel cleaning lady knocked on my door, asking me if I needed any clothes washed. The do not disturb light is apparently meaningless, as this has happened 3 days in a row now, but I digress. I told her no, and she responded with something I initially processed as “duì bu qǐ, several words you don’t know, le”. But in retrospect, I think what she really said was “duì bu qǐ máfan nǐ le”. (对不起麻烦你了, Sorry to bother you.) Only, what she really, really said was “duì bu qǐ máa nǐ le”. Farewell, /f/. Farewell, /n/. At least, I think the /n/ went away too, although since the next word started with /n/, it’s a little hard to say for sure.
This sets up a nice tonal contrast with the word “mǎshàng” (马上, right away), which is often elided to “mǎàng” and, to my ear anyway, sometimes all the way to “mǎà”
Yes, that’s má.a vs. mǎ.à. I think, in both cases, the second syllable retains a nasalized vowel. Both, incidentally, still sound bisyllabic, but it’s only, or primarily, the tone change that indicates the syllable break. In my own nerdy way, I find this really cool. Can anyone confirm for me whether or not it’s for real?
side note: post title inspired by the resemblance between the words elision and Elysian. But for the record, elision comes from Latin and Elysian from Greek, so the apparent resemblance is of no significance. But we were talking about Chinese.
By Katie, on August 26th, 2011
Better late than never, I decided to attempt to pursue the no-longer-so recent statements on Language Log about Dalian dialect (or topolect, as Victor Mair, the author of the post, more accurately calls it).
The discussion arose as the result of a sign in Dalian that was full of mysterious and wonderful Chinglish, all of which turned out to be the fault of Google Translate. Of interest to the post at hand, the vendor was selling 火勺, which Google Translate unhelpfully renders as “fire spoon”. What is this mysterious 火勺, if not a device for moving coals around? It’s actually a type of 饼, but apparently this food, or possibly just the name, isn’t widely found in China. What other parts of China do have is 火烧. The question raised in the Language Log post is whether 火勺 could be a local rendering of 火烧. In standard Mandarin, 火勺 is pronounced huǒsháo and 火烧 huǒshāo. In other words, the only difference between the two is the tone on the second syllable. The first has a rising tone; the second has a high level tone. We foreigners would confuse the two in a heartbeat, but we’d expect that Chinese speakers would be able to keep their tones straight.
But … welcome to the wonderful world of dialectology. Even in Mandarin speaking areas, there’s a vast range of pronunciation. Standard Mandarin is taught in schools. What’s spoken in the home and on the street may sound drastically different. My general impression from flipping through a book about Chinese dialects a long time ago (somebody better start fact checking me here) is that the tones can be highly variable; go to another village and you’ll get another set of tones.
According to Mair, Dalian dialect has no rising tone. Rising (second) tone words are pronounced as either first (high level) or fourth (falling) tone. So of course, having no actual second tone, Dalian speakers might substitute second tone 勺 for first tone 烧 when writing down the name of this food.
But is it true? In an attempt to find out, I finally decided to ask an native Dalian-ren. (Well, ok, my husband finally decided to ask–good thing, as this report is undoubtedly more accurate with the help of his Chinese in the conversation.) He had certainly heard of 火勺–and was surprised that we had never tried it. He said there was no such thing as 火烧–he assumed that I was getting it confused with 烧饼. Definite point in favor of the “local name for a more widely eaten food” theory.
But did this result from a tone confusion? When asked how 火勺 is pronounced in Dalian dialect, he gave us a (heavily er-huaed) huǒsháo. In subsequent conversation about the food, I could be convinced that shao was toneless (as it’s “supposed to” be in Dalian), but in isolation, there was definitely a (supposedly non-existent) rising tone. We asked a few more questions about how various words are pronounced and got some second tones and some non-second tones where standard Mandarin has second tones. But if anything, there was a tendency to turn second tones into third tones, not first or fourth tones. For example, when asked how rénmínlù would be pronounced in Dalian dialect, we heard yěnmínlù. (That’s third-second instead of second-second.) When we asked directly about tones in Dalian dialect, we were told that second tones are seldom used and fourth tones are emphasized. So initial research suggests that, if there has been a local transformation in writing from 火烧 to 火勺, Dalian dialect is not to blame.
Now, the linguists among you are probably feeling a little skeptical about my conclusions at this point, and you should be. This is why I’m optimistically calling this “Part 1″. Potential problems with my data:
- Although the Chinese person we asked is native to Dalian, he can speak fairly standard Mandarin, and did so during this conversation. This might affect his rendering of Dalian dialect.
- He might not even call himself a Dalian-ren (someone who’s native to Dalian) because at least one of his grandparents is from Shandong. This might be significant for our purposes since he lived with his grandparents for much of his life. He certainly speaks something that is not standard Mandarin when speaking to people who speak local dialects–but perhaps we’re getting some Shandong dialect thrown in with the Dalian dialect.
- He doesn’t self-report tones very accurately, so it’s possible that his opinions about Dalian tones are not actually referring to the tones we think they’re referring to, and even if they are they might or might not descriibe actual patterns in the dialect. (It’s pretty typical for people who haven’t been trained to describe language to be pretty inaccurate when they try to do so.)
- A sample size of one is always reason for skepticism.
More research to come, I hope, but don’t hold your breath waiting …
By Katie, on July 16th, 2011
That the c-section rate in China is remarkably high is no secret. I’ve heard various theories about this–doctors like convenience, patients like convenience, patients like auspicious birth dates and times, hospitals like money, there’s no risk to a second pregnancy since there won’t be one … probably all factors, but I digress. This is supposed to be a language blog, after all.
So instead, I present unto all the passionate natural birth advocates out there a new method of discouraging c-sections: a little vocabulary lesson. C-section in Chinese is 剖腹产. Seppuku is 剖腹. Given the amount of attention people here pay to lucky dates and so forth, and given that language seems to play a huge role in determining what is lucky, you’d think that a method of being born that sounds like a way to commit suicide would be the ultimate inauspicious entry into the world. But what do I know?
Of course 剖腹 also has the more mundane meaning of cutting a stomach open. But still.
By Katie, on May 17th, 2011
I went to pick my daughter up from school the other day, and another student’s grandmother decided to chat with me. Or try, anyway. She asked me a question. I probably actually knew all the words she used, but my brain fixated on the word “ban”. I thought to myself, “Aha! She wants to know what class my daughter is in.” I answered that my daughter was in “yīng yī bān”. But even as I was formulating my answer, my brain was sending out all sorts of warning signals that my answer didn’t match her question very well. I thought a little more and realized that she had actually been asking me whether my daughter attended school for half days (“bàn tiān”). So I apologized and answered her question again, telling her that yes, my daughter only attended half days because she was still small. Or at least I think I answered her question. At this point, she gave up on trying to talk to me. So maybe I should have been looking for yet another “ban”.
Chinese has lots and lots and lots of homonyms. And if, like most foreigners, your tones are only so-so, you can multiply that by a factor of four. I find that, for myself, I do a reasonably ok job of picking out tone if I’m listening for tone (like if someone teaches me a new word), and I think I even do an ok job of producing it as long as I’ve memorized the word correctly. However, the careful reader (and/or actual Chinese speaker) will notice that in real life, this falls apart: I don’t pay much attention to tone when I’m also trying to carry on a conversation. If I’m using it to identify words, it’s not at a conscious level. In this case, ‘bān’ and ‘bàn’ aren’t actually homonyms, so in theory the whole problem should have been avoided. But for the near future at least, unless I can find myself some really good listening training, I’m probably much better off paying attention to context, which does a much better job of disambiguating anyway.
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