Re: Chinese Dialect Question

on 9/30/03 9:20 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:

> 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.
Am I the only one who likes it? It has a very distinctive look, and in some
ways it's very well designed, IMHO. And you do get used to it after a little
while. It's easier than memorizing thousands of hanzi anyway.

>>> 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].
Yes, I forgot the aspiration. But /ts_h/ would be spelled |c|, no? |x q j|
represent the alveo-palatals.

>>> 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...

and on 9/30/03 9:46 PM, Garth Wallace at gwalla@DESPAMMED.COM wrote:

> 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/. 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?
>
> Where? I don't think "my Chinese" or "my pinyin" counts...they're
> referring to your own skills.
I didn't say "pinyin skills," though, just "pinyin." I was referring to
pinyin itself, which really has nothing to do with me. If you take "my
pinyin" literally, it doesn't even make sense - the word "my" seems only to
make it more personal, in a similar way to the "your average X" construction
discussed in the other thread. The sentence would have had the same truth
value if I left "my" out. Of course, I don't really know anything about
these ethical possessives or datives, I'm just thinking out loud.

--
Josh Roth

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

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

Replies