Re: Questions (mostly about phonemics)

On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 07:08:24PM -0800, Adam Walker wrote:
> --- "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
>
> > (Off-topic note: that's why Pinyin makes me cringe... writing
> > unaspirated /t/ as [d] makes it extremely prone for foreigners to
> > mispronounce.)
> >
>
> And writing aspitated-t as [th] is better for avoiding
> mispronunciations?
At least /th/ can be understood as [t] followed by [h], which "makes
sense" as indicating aspirated [t]. Whereas the difference between /t/
and /d/ has to be learned independently.


> > > Maybe that's why other Romanization systems have a lot of unvoiced
> > > consanants, as in the name of the Taiwanese city Kaohsiung (pinyin
> > > Gaoxiong).
> >
> > Taiwanese (Hokkien) has a 3-way distinction in stops, e.g., [t_h],
> > [t], and [d] are all distinct phonemes.
>
> [d] is NOT a phoneme in Taiwanese.  [k_h], [k] and [g] form a
> triplet, though.  [d] (and several other odd intermediaries) are
> allophones of [l] and are written as "l".
Oops, excuse me. I meant to use the labial stops or velar stops, but for
some reason chose dental, which doesn't have the full series.


> > Writing Kaohsiung as "Gaoxiong" is just weird to Taiwanese ears
> > (er... eyes), given that [g] is distinct from unaspirated [k] in
> > Taiwanese, and that "g" is traditionally used to transcribe [g] in
> > Taiwanese.
> >
>
> The only complaint *I* ever heard about pinyin romanization is that it
> is communist.  No one I met in three years in Taiwan was competent in
> using ANY romanization for Mandarin.  The Presbyterians were
> proficient in use of the standard Romanization for Taiwnaese, but no
> one was good with any of the competing Romanizations for Mandarin.
Heh. Maybe the complaint is more political than anything else. Although,
I suspect a lot of it is simply because it doesn't look like the
traditional scheme, and therefore strange and awkward. (And I freely
admit of being biased in this direction as well.) Had Pinyin been used
from the beginning, I suspect none of these complaints would've
surfacede in the first place.


> > Yes, this is the so-called "tone sandhi" phenomenon, which is pretty
> > well-known. Hokkien, my L1, has a whole bunch of tone sandhi rules.
> >
>
> I wonder how/if Hokkien sandhi differs from Taiwanese.
Do you mean mainland Hokkien vs. Taiwanese, or SE Asian
(Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia) Hokkien vs. Taiwanese? Taiwanese is
closer to mainland Hokkien than SE Asian Hokkien, so if anything, tone
sandhi differences are more likely to occur in SE Asian Hokkien.

Singaporian/Malaysian Hokkien has substituted the high falling tone with
high/mid rising, although AFAIK the tone sandhi rules are still
essentially the same. (This tone 4 phenomenon is one of the ways we
locals identify those Taiwanese foreigners. :-)) But there may be some
differences that I'm unaware of.


> I found those rules to be the most difficult thing about learning to
> read any text in Romanization.  It's marked X so pronounce it Y, and
> the next one is marked Y so pronounce it X.
As an L1 speaker, it seems that I learned them simply by sheer weight of
"textual corpus"---i.e., I always hear certain words pronounced with a
different tone when preceding words of a certain tone, and so to
pronounce it otherwise sounds "strange". I was never explicitly taught
any of the tone sandhi rules. Unfortunately, this is completely
unhelpful to the L2 learner since to have that much experience with the
language requires one to already know the language in the first place.


T

--
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carefully worked out beforehand. In practice, design documents are
written after the fact to describe the sorry mess that has gone on
before.

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