Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 01:45:00AM -0400, JR wrote:
> on 9/30/03 11:17 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 10:56:39PM -0400, JR wrote:
> >> on 9/30/03 9:20 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:
[snip]
> > To me, if you care about distinctive look, learn hanzi. :-) Romanization
> > should at least not deliberately be contrary to common Western phonetic
> > values for the letters.
>
> I'll give you that hanzi are distinctive. But it's really too much
> information for my brain to hold onto if I'm not actually using them
> regularly (ok, and even if I am).
You're not alone. I spent 6 years learning hanzi and today I can't even
read a newspaper... :-( But then again, I was a rather bad student in
primary school, so perhaps the blame rests mostly on me.

> A couple of years ago I must have known hundreds of hanzi. Now I know
> maybe 20. Pinyin though, I never forgot. And I think it's not THAT
> weird.
It *is* weird if you've gotten used to the previous transcription scheme,
though!

> Portuguese and Catalan (and Basque???) use |x| for /S/. And I think
> Albanian also uses |q| for something similar to the Chinese. Not that
> Albanian represents a Western standard or anything :-/ , but it's not
> unattested.
*I* think we should just invent new glyphs to expand the Latin alphabet.
For one thing, the dreary shortage of vowels should be repaired. With only
*2* more vowel glyphs, I wouldn't have to use _3_ and _0_ for Ebisedian
transcription, which is as ugly as Pinyin. :-P

[snip]
> > I have the misfortune (or perhaps not-so-misfortune) of growing up with a
> > dialect of Mandarin where all of these are allophonous, so while I can
> > *hear* the difference when a Beijing speaker says it, I have a hard time
> > producing it myself for the right words and keeping track of how they are
> > romanized.
>
> When you say they're allophonous, you mean the dentals and corresponding
> alveopalatals?
Well, in my dialect of Mandarin, all sibilants have become [s] (or [S] if
being hyper-corrective). All affricates have become [tS] or [ts] (again,
allophonous).

[snip]
> > I'm all for sticking with the original transcription, which, although
> > imperfect, is at least not pathological, like Pinyin's usage of _q_ for
> > [ts] and _x_ for a *sibilant* (I believe [s`] or some variant thereof), of
> > all things. I wish they'd spend their creative efforts on uniquely
> > representing vowels like [M] (*) or differentiating between [@] and [E],
> > instead of coming up with such silly uses of _q_ and _x_.
> >
> > (*) Which is currently represented as _i_, as is [i], making it impossible
> > to know what is the right pronunciation unless you already know Mandarin
> > to begin with.
>
> Not so impossible! |i| is pronounced as [1] (or [M], I guess) after
> alveopalatals |x q j| and postalveolar |sh ch zh|. The combination |ri| is
> ... something else really weird.
Well, that's why I'd prefer a unique vowel to be assigned for [1]/[M].
When I see _ri_ I keep thinking "what on earth is pronounced [ri:] in
Mandarin?!"

> Other than that, |i| after any other consonant is [i]. Actually I
> suppose you could say they're allophones of one phoneme, in which case
> it makes perfect sense to write them the same way.
Perhaps... nevertheless, it is rather confusing until you're used to the
conventions. (And even then, I still have trouble with it...)

> Of course ... if your consonants have been merging, the vowel quality
> isn't going to be predictable anymore. Perhaps that's the source of your
> frustration.
That may be it. The vowels are *mostly* preserved in my dialect of
Mandarin; it's only the consonants that are merging. But I guess that
exposes the difference in previously allophonous vowels, so that I find it
rather disconcerting to see [1] and [i] represented identically.

> Vowels _in combination_ do pretty funny things in pinyin though, I'll
> admit.
I still maintain that [1], [y], and [i] need to be differentiated, as with
[@] and [E].

> As for sibilants, they fall into a nice pattern:
>
>                 fric.       asp. affr.      unasp. affr.
> dental          s           c               z
> alveopalatal    x           q               j
> postalveolar    sh          ch              zh
In my dialect, all fricatives become [s], all aspirated affrics become
[ts_h] and all unaspirated affrics become [ts]. (Alternatively [tS_h] and
[tS] for the latter two.) This might be why I find _q_ and _x_ so foreign.
:-)

But believe it or not, this merging does not result in significant
ambiguity, so we are still mutually intelligible with Beijing folk. (In
fact, most linguistically-uninformed speakers would regard the two as
identical.)

[snip]
> Given that these do all have distinct pronunciations in the standard, to
> replace e.g. |q| with |ts| as you suggested elsewhere wouldn't be
> appropriate - one would think it it was dental rather than alveopalatal.
> You could use |tx| I guess, but it messes up the system. Perhaps
> something like |sy cy zy| for the alveopalatals would work. I'd say to
> simply use |si ci zi| for those, since it looks nicer and |i| is already
> often used redundantly after the alveopalatals in pinyin anyway, but
> there would result some ambiguities.
[snip]

Perhaps my difficulty lies in the fact that [q], [c] and [ch] are all
identical in my dialect.


T

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Mediocrity has been pushed to extremes.