Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

No, it’s not sex industry, just sexy běijīnghuà. Who’s responsible for the cheap headline tricks? Blame sexybeijing.tv…

Why had I never come across SexyBeijing.tv before last week?! The hostess, Anna Sophie Loewenberg aka Su Fei, is both forever-single and singular. Whether it’s her sundresses, pretty darned good běijīnghuà, or disarmingly candid questions and commentary — she has a knack for weaving personal questions into Mandarin banter and getting spontaneous responses from the kind of on-the-street types that you don’t usually get to hear from. Best of all for Beijing Sounds, she does most of her work in this capital city. Thus, through her interviews of in-the-hútòng Beijingers speaking thick běijīnghuà, we can get a sexy twist on the decidedly unsexy topic of intervocalic sibilant¹ elision [yawn], which might be better stated as:

Beijingers sometimes drop the sh, zh and x in the middle of words/phrases.

You might think it’s not just unsexy, but even unworthy as a Beijing Sounds topic. After all, lotsa languages do a similar thing. My relatives from New Mexico tend to turn “doesn’t” into “dunt” or even “dun” depending on context (and the “dunt” is not the same as the “don’t” used for 3rd person in some English dialects — it really is just “doesn’t” minus the Z sound in the middle).

But in Beijing you can’t avoid the elision any more than you can avoid your neighbor’s buttocks on the #5 subway. It’s especially prevalent with certain words and phrases. AND, it makes things hard to understand for those trained in pǔtōnghuà. What better excuse do you need for reading on? Do I need to promise discussion of sex and money? For example, take the “how much money” phrase that expats are supposed to learn before they’re allowed out of their compounds

多少钱 duōshǎoqián? = How much money?

I thought I had the “how much money” thing down cold long before I’d spent any real time in Beijing. I’d learned it from my Beijinger mother-in-law and no one ever seemed to have trouble understanding. What I actually said was something like duō ěr qián. Only much later as I began trying to learn the infernal hànzì and tried to type “duō ěr qián” did I come to learn how one is “supposed” to say it. Yet I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Beijinger ever saying the sh in that phrase, except in a classroom of hapless foreign students.

With sibilant elision, you get examples like:

	普通话 pǔtōnghuà, i.e. standard Mandarin (full pronunciation)	北京话 běijīnghuà, i.e. Beijing Dialect (rapid pronunciation)
二十八 = twenty-eight	èrshíbā	èr-r-bā (or maybe just èr-bā)
为什么 = why	wèishénme	wèi-h-me (h?! — there’s something syllabic in the middle)
白小玉 = person’s name	bǎixiǎoyù	bǎi-ǎo-yù (maybe a really soft h sound in the second syllable)

So where does sexy come in? Today’s sound clips are taken from some of SexyBeijing’s videos, of course. We don’t do sexy here at Beijing Sounds, we just listen to it.

Super Female Students

[Correction: Significant mistake below -- thanks to commenter Josh for pointing out gross ignorance on the part of my incompetent editor. What you see here as 超级女生 should be 超级女声, which makes a lot more sense when you think about it. Still, we'll leave the mistake in place for posterity -- why change a good title?]

Did I mention this post would bring up sex? Well, not much, really, but how about sexual preference among today’s young Chinese women? This clip from Sexy Hot Pants had, for me, a new vocabulary word: lesbian, nǚtóngxìngliàn 女同性恋. Not that it’s a subject I’d shy away from, but for some reason the people I generally learn from (specifically Mrs. Beijing Sounds along with Princess and Grandma Beijing Sounds) just never thought to bring it up, I guess.

The new vocab was in the context of the Supergirls (超级女生 chāojínǚshēng), but someone else is going to have to shed light on them. I perused the web enough to see that there is/was some TV show and rumors/outings. Danwei has a post from 2006. There were a whole bunch of youtube videos I didn’t have time to watch.More importantly, the clip also has several good examples of full sibilant elision and lots of in-between examples — more like sibilant erosion. The ones that are dropping out are all marked in the pinyin with the strikethrough, but even among those you’ll hear that some of them have some sibilance, some of the time

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最近可能在准备一个女同性恋 unclear 一个，一个电影儿
zuìjìn kěnéng zài zhǔnbèi yígè nǚtóngxìngliàn [unclear] yígè, yígè diànyǐngr
These days I’m probably working on a film about lesbians

然后讲的是中国的现在，因为现在中国有超级女生
ránhòu jiǎngde shì zhōngguóde xiànzài, yīnwei xiànzài zhōngguó yǒu chāojínǚshēng
talking about today in China, because now China has the Supergirls (lit. super female students)

中国超级女生之后了，好多中国女孩儿开始喜欢女孩儿了．
zhōngguó chāojínǚshēng zhīhòu le, hǎoduō zhōngguó nǚhár kāishǐ xǐhuān nǚhárle

其实不知道为什么
qíshí bùzhīdào wèishénme

And here’s the two in isolation (nǚshēng
and bùzhīdào wèishénme)

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How Much Money?

This clip, also from Sexy Hot Pants, is what I consider the classic: The sh-ellision turns duōshǎoqián into duō-ěr-qián at the very end of the clip. Also, near the beginning, qíshì turns into qí-ì(r) — or however you wanna spell that.

For context, the singer being interviewed had earlier said they sold 100,000 actual copies.

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如果加上盗版的话，可能会有一百万张．
rúguǒ jiāshàng dàobǎn de huà, kěnéng huì néng yǒu yībǎi wàn zhāng
Adding in piracy, there might be a million copies.

其实百分之９０的钱，都别人拿走了
qíshí bǎifēnzhī jiǔshí de qián dōu biérén ná zǒu le.
But actually 90% of the money is taken by other people.

我们CD卖十，十几块，我们一张可能拿三毛人民币
wǒmen CD mài shí, shíjǐ kuài, wǒmen yìzhāng kěnéng ná sānmáo rénmínbì
My CDs cell for a little more than 10 yuan. We get maybe 0.3 yuan for each one.

所以十万张没多少钱．
suǒyǐ shíwàn zhāng méi duōshǎoqián [duō-ěr-qián]
So 100,000 copies isn’t very much money

And here is méi duō-ěr-qián in isolation

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An Ex-Con

In the final clip, now from Bad Boys of Beijing. The interviewee, an ex-con, waxes philosophical about the age of 20 being the dividing line between adult responsibility and, hmm, well, let’s call it carefree childhood. Those interested in what constitutes “carefree” can watch the whole clip to see exactly what that entails in his case.

[audio /files/2008/02/ivfd_badboys_20sui_full.mp3]

中国人就是象北京人，他比较传统
zhōngguórén jiùshì xiàng běijīngrén, tā bǐjiào* chuántǒng
A Chinese, like a Beijinger, he is rather traditional

他说二十岁之前是小的时候，他都无所谓 就是什么 玩儿，跑
tā shuō érshí suì zhīqián shì xiǎode shíhou, tā dōu wúsuǒwèi jiù shì shénme wánr, pǎo
He says before age 20, nothing really matters, playing, running around

可是到了实干的年龄，他觉得他该，该成家立业的时候了
kěshì dàole shígàn de niánlíng, tā juéde tā gāi, gāi chéngjiā lìyè de shíhou le
But when he arrives at the practical time of life, he feels he should — it’s time to get married and settle down

那他肯定得找一个踏踏实实的谁不愿意找一个比较自己喜欢的女人
nà tā kěndìng děi zhǎo yígè tātāshíshíde shéi búyuànyì zhǎo yígè bǐjiào zìjǐ xǐhuān de nǚrén
Then of course he should look for a quiet life; who wouldn’t want to look for a women he could like

And finally, here’s “20 years old” two times just for fun: èrshí suì

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* This pronunciation, bǐjiào, is the pronunciation that 比较 is “supposed” to have. But this sounds a lot like bìjiào, both times it occurs in this soliloquy. Since Beijing Sounds never takes “supposed to” for an answer, we promise to keep an eye on this one and report back at some future date.

¹ Update: clearly this term is wrong by way of being too specific. Sounds like /s/ and /x/ are sibilants, but it’s not just sibilants that get elided. How about more generally, “consonant elision”?