Re: Chinese Dialect Question

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/. This is such a bizarre difference that I had to make a theory
> about why. Either (1) "Quan" is just a truly awful Romanization, or (2)
> "Quan" is a pretty decent Romanization for Mandarin, but /tSwEn/ is
> speaking and pronouncing his name in a different dialect. 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/.

Hmm ... did I just use an ethical possessive up there?

--
Josh Roth

http://www34.brinkster.com/fuscian/index.html

"Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage."
-Ogden Nash

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