Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 06:42:43PM -0400, JR wrote:
> on 9/30/03 5:20 PM, JS Bangs at jaspax@U.WASHINGTON.EDU wrote:
>
> > In the department I work at, we just got a new grad student from China
> > named "Quan Zhou". We naturally pronounced the first part of that as
> > /kwan/, more or less, until he arrived and said something more like
> > /tSwEn/.
Sounds like it's not Guang Zhou (traditionally "Canton"), but a different
province.

> > This is such a bizarre difference that I had to make a theory
> > about why. Either (1) "Quan" is just a truly awful Romanization,
This is one of the things that turn me off about Pinyin.

> > or (2) "Quan" is a pretty decent Romanization for Mandarin, but
> > /tSwEn/ is speaking and pronouncing his name in a different dialect.
He's pronouncing it right. _Q_ in Pinyin is pronounced something like
[ts_h].

> > Can the Sinologists on the list confirm or deny either hypothesis?
>
> I'm not a sinologist, and I've even forgotten most of my Chinese, but I do
> know my pinyin (standard romanization for Mandarin) - Quan is the correct
> way to write the name. The 'q' is an alveo-palatal affricate /ts\/, and
> after one of those 'uan' is pronounced something like /yEn/ or maybe /HEn/.
[snip]

That's right, /u/ in this context is the rounded palatoalveolar
approximant. So the proper pronunciation of _quan_ would be [ts_hHEn].
(I'm using [_h] to mark aspiration, I hope that's not too confusing to
read.)


T

--
If you want to solve a problem, you need to address the root cause of the
problem, not just the symptoms. Otherwise it's like treating cancer with
Tylenol...

Reply