Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Some observations on Mandarin...

From:Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Date:Sunday, September 10, 2000, 1:56
Especially for anyone who knows something about Mandarin and/or Chinese
linguistics, please feel free to critique...

The other night I made a spreadsheet and filled in a chart of
consonant-rime syllable groups in Mandarin (from zhongwen.com); the
rimes of course are the vowel + nasal when applicable groups.  (I've
been working, off and on, on a reformed Pinyin; I was going to merge ch
> q, sh > x, zh > j; I might not since it is very necessary to
distinguish retroflexes from palatals as clearly as possible.) About the retroflexes. Since the retroflex consonants are ch, sh, zh and r, and the palatal consonants are q, x, j and y, I came to the discovery that r and y could be related closer than I imagined! Of course we know that y means the palatal semivowel (or maybe, more emphatically, a voiced palatal fricative), and r is a retroflex approximant (or maybe a fricative -- anybody know?). And both labiovelar w and labiopalatal semivocalic ü can be found. So that gave me a better handle on consonant "umlaut" in Tech: as there is a "soft" and "hard" /w/ (IPA inverted h vs. IPA w), there should be a "soft" and "hard" /j/ (IPA j vs. IPA inverted r with retroflex tail?). So the name Ja'aqob would be pronounced something like "Ra'akov"! Anyway, I'm really having fun with this. And praise God, we finally got some rain this weekend!! DaW. (Stay tuned for: if you breed a sitar with a banjo, what do you get?) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/