Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:06:19 +0200, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:

>Den 21. aug. 2008 kl. 17.19 skreiv R A Brown:
>> Nor is it true that anglophones give pronunciation based _English_
>> rules. The most common pronunciation of Beijing that I hear on the
>> British media pronounces the medial _j_ as [Z] - and judging by one
>> email I read in this thread, this is not unknown on the other side
>> of the Pond. These people are giving the _j_ the *French*
>> pronunciation because "It's a _foreign_ word, in'it?"
>
>Yeah, right. That's the English pronunciation I've heard most often,
>too. I guess that's what we call hypercorrection in linguistics.
Possibly.  However, I kind of wonder if certain English speakers don't
actually _perceive_ the sound (among other Chinese sounds) that way.  If it
hasn't been tested before, I think a study should be done this way:

Take four groups of anglophone students with little to no exposure to
Mandarin.  Each group would be taught unfamiliar Mandarin terms and tested
on them using one of four techniques:

1 pinyin only
2 pronunciation only
3 pinyin plus pronunciation with no training in pinyin
4 pinyin plus pronunciation along with some instruction on the pinyin
romanization system

Anybody do language acquisition research?  Think this would be valuable?

>>> There is, by the way, one language that nativises even more
>>> weirdly than English: the Welsh.
>>
>> I suspect Mandarin will nativize even more weirdly.
>
>Of course...
Oh, definitely.  Just some examples:

Simple phonetic transcriptions:

Coca Cola = ke3 kou3 ke3 le4
Ramada = hua2 mei3 da2 (question, are there actually anglophones who say
/ra'mejd@/ instead of /ra'mad@/?)
Virginia = fu1 jin1 ni1 ya4 _or_ wei4 ji1 ni1 ya4 (not sure on the tones)
Canada = jia1 na2 da4
Spain = xi4 ban2 ya2

Repurposed phonetic approximations:
(these are characters that seem to have started as part of a transliteration
and have now taken on an association with a particular country)

&#33521; ying1 "England, Britain"
&#32654; me3 "America" -- in two different senses*
&#27861; fa3 "France"
&#24503; de2 "Germany"

Add guo2 to any of those and you have the name of the country.  Add wen2 or
yu3 and you get the local language (probably only yu3 or maybe hua4 for
"America", since we speak a dialect of English).

*I say this because it can mean "America" as in "the Americas" and "America"
as in "The United States".  I got to wondering how Latinos learning Chinese
might feel since Spanish uses "América" for all of the Americas, such that
it's polite for people from the United States to identify themselves as
"norteamericano" or "estadounidense" ("gringo" if you want to be informal
and kinda funny) -- yet I have yet to see the full name "The United States
of America" used ANYWHERE in Chinese -- even in the opening ceremony to the
Olympics (granted, we don't use the full names of ALL the countries in
English either -- I've never seen "The United Mexican States" in a walk of
nations -- and the Chinese announcer at the Beijing opening ceremonies
announced China as simply "Zhongguo" rather than
"zhong1hua2ren2min2gong1he2guo2" -- despite the English and French
announcers used the whole name).

Anyway -- to the point.  Eventually, I saw a world map in Chinese and, lo
and behold, the United States was marked as mei3guo2, while the continents
are bei3mei3zhou1 and nan2mei3zhou1 (_north "America" continent_ and _south
"America" continent_, respectively).  There, problem solved (aside from the
possibility that maybe one over-sensitive South American might learn Chinese
and INSIST that it's politically incorrect, but I haven't heard of any cases
yet).

Wow, my footnote was two paragraphs.  Damn.

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