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Re: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase

From:Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...>
Date:Friday, September 3, 2004, 14:42
Andreas writes:

>Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>: > >> Retroflexion is basically a Beijing regional feature that drops off >> as one moves away from the capital, and basically doesn't exist in >> most of the Mandarin-speaking area except as an artificially learned >> feature. People who don't have it pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c >> respectively, don't pronounce -r at all, and I'm not sure what they >> do with r-. Using -h- as a sort of retroflexion diacritic makes >> sense in this context, whereas there is little connection between sh and r. > >To continue my wild speculation in this thread ... > >Wade-Giles, which is IIRC based on southernly variants of Mandarin, uses 'j', >and I've seen books transcribing /r/ as [Z]. I'll therefore hazard >they use [Z] >for r- in non-retroflex areas.
I was under the impression that WG adopted "j", thanks to French. Here again, the range is quite broad. /Z/ is acceptable; an American-English "r" doesn't send the proletariat shrieking across the horizon; one native-speaker friend even came close to /l/ ("Lao2 le wo3 ba!" = "Rao2 le wo3 ba!" = "Épargne-moi!"). Mine is an American "r", with the tongue in the retroflex position, with a little "l" thrown in. I rarely get the fricativeness of a /Z/ in there, unless I'm reciting the "bo po mo fo." Kou