On metaphors living and fossilized; YR Chao’s syllable-final M
If you’re a real-estate-free Minnesotan you might be feeling kind of self-righteous right now.
“That house I sold in June. Yeah, I sold it at a loss, but I took the blow and look at me now! Sitting in my rental, calling the manager the second the faucet threatens to drip and subscribing to every Sky-is-Falling economic blog I can put my mouse on.
More like schadenfreude, I suppose, and, yes, you are annoying but probably not as annoying as the Californian who sold his house in 2007.
Economics has a way of exacting its revenge one way or another. You come down off your fatuous high and start pissing and moaning about the bailout for Wall Street, feeding off of your Main Street money, and about the politicians who can’t seem to find another metaphor to save their political hides. Then you abuse a metaphor of your own, thinking about those fat cats…
Hey, but do you really think they’re fat? The people on Wall Street, that is. No, I mean: really, fat? Like, corpulent?
The Beijing Sounds theory of the month (BJS TOTM™) for October is that Beijingers (maybe just those over 60) really think bosses are fat. Truly. Literally. How else would you explain the following little incident? It’s YU talking about visiting some friends and seeing a photo on their computer of a mutual acquaintance:
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Nèi tiān zài tāmen jiā jīsuànjī shàng kànjian
那天在他们家计算机上看见
That day at their house on the computer (I) saw
Wà! Biàn de pàng! Āiyōuwei. Jiù gēn yī dà lǎobǎn yīyàng
哇！ 变得胖！ 哎哟喂！ 就跟一大老板一样
Wow! He’d gotten fat! Oh my gosh. Just like a big boss
This is all quite literal, no question. Given that it is, and she’s just trying to say that the fellow was genuinely fat, the English comparison would have to be fat like a pig, maybe an elephant…. But definitely not a boss. It’s not that “bosses are fat” would be insulting, just nonsensical.
Makes you wonder how many other Beijingers would have the “bosses are fat” association top of mind. I’m still guessing it’s a generational thing. You have to be old enough to have been through some years of real deprivation to retain the belief that getting fat takes money, and only big bosses have the money it takes to do it. Surely there used to be such an association among English speakers. Thus we still talk about the fatcats. But we’ve lost the metaphoric oomph that having actually been hungry used to provide people when using the term.
There’s another good tidbit here, an idea I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Listen to that tāmen in the first line. Pretty darned close to “tām jiā”, wouldn’t you say? It’s not the best example of the phenomenon (keep in mind the BJS Studios have been closed this week and the head archivist is vacationing in a dark corner of the Shangdi subway stop), but the clip is enough to get the conversation started.
The phenomenon is, basically, that the -en of tāmen, wǒmen, zánmen (他们， 我们， 咱们) just sort of disappears, and so you’re left with three words that end in M, which is not “supposed to be” possible in the syllable structure of Mandarin. That is, syllables aren’t supposed to end with M. But in these rare cases, they seem to.
That was my observation, way back when I first started here at Yuèmǔ U. But I kept it to myself. Original observations are great, and everyone wants to have them. The danger is that they are sometimes too original. I’ve come up with a lot of things that seem to exist only in my own head.
So it’s nice to have somebody provide independent confirmation, especially when that somebody is a renowned expert who knows the literature inside and out. That would be Yuen Ren Chao (赵元任), of course.
He makes a comment about tāmen=>tām in his classic, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, which still graces my (disgracefully messy) dinner table. It’s in a section (p.54) on vowels, and the decision he’s trying to make is whether to say that there is only one a phoneme in Mandarin. Or are there two?
For the most part, one a seems to do the trick.
The low vowel-phoneme a has a medium quality in open syllables, affronted quality before front endings (-i, -n) and a back quality before back endings (-o, -ng).*
In other words, for example, ta, tan and tang may not have exactly the same a sound, but the a always changes in a predictable way in the context of the subsequent sound, so the sound difference isn’t significant to the speaker.
However, he comes up with an astounding (to me) minimal pair that would seem to make the case that spoken Mandarin actually does distinguish between two different a sounds:
tāmen bù lái
他们不来
they are not comingtān bù lái
怹不来
he (honorific) is not coming
Wow. Several things.
1. You have to note, and he does explain this in the book, that in rapid speech the -en in the first sentence gets dropped (just as in the recording above) AND the -n in tān bù lái changes into an -m in a natural process of assimilation because it is followed by the b- of bù lái. (Similarly, MBA and NBA sound the same when spoken at conversational speeds.) The end result is that both sentences look like: tām bù lái
2. BUT, he is claiming that a native speaker, listening to these sentences spoken, would in fact be able to distinguish them by the quality of the first a of tām v. tān(m). I’ll take him at his word, for now, but that’s a claim worth testing.
3. I had no idea that the honorific third person male singular (”he” = tān, 怹) even existed. Strike one blow against the windmill of ignorance.
In the end, Chao decides not to introduce two different a phonemes into his grammar. Instead he deals with this minimal pair by treating the -m as a syllable by itself. But that’s a bit of a technical detail. For today, I’m vindicated in having identified a phenomenon that at least one other person in the world has believed in! 金六福 for everyone, on the house!
*Sorry, Gwoyeu Romatzyh fans. I’ve converted his GR to Pinyin
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Comments 16
I find that Yuen Ren Chao minimal-pair thing fascinating (but then, I am a Mandarin nerd). Granted, the example is contrived to the extreme – who would ever use 怹 in speech (I did not know this word/character existed either)? – but he may be onto something with it. I had never explicitly noted the dropping of the -en in those three words, although I certainly recognized it when you pointed it out, particularly in the case of 咱们. It’s a bit like the phenomenon in German where -en tends to become -m for verb infinitives; “bleiben” sounds more like “bleibm” and so on.
Posted 05 Oct 2008 at 12:34 am ¶Welcome to Nerdville. I love that example too, along with the preposterous idea that someone might casually distinguish “tam bu lai” and “tan bu lai” on the basis of the A! For a hint at how obscure 怹 is, try typing it with your IME and see how how many screens you have to scroll through.
My intuition (faulty though it is) is that you’re right about 咱们 — that it’s almost always shortened to something like zám. Not clear to me why, though.
Posted 05 Oct 2008 at 2:14 am ¶I would listen again to how they “drop” the -en. It’s actually not totally gone. Basically, what I hear when people do that is they switch from an “m” to an “n” without really parting the lips and forming a vowel between the “m” and “n”. So, you have more of a “tamn” instead of “tan” or “tam.” I believe what is actually happening is that the “e” of the -en ending is skipped and the “m” is nasalized (sp).
Posted 05 Oct 2008 at 6:25 pm ¶Hi Josh, well if you say N “without really parting the lips” you’re getting pretty close to the textbook definition of an M. (Even if your tongue is in an N position, no one can hear the difference.)
But even if you don’t call it an N, you’ve still got a good point, if I’m reading your idea correctly. It’s similar to Chao’s final analysis that I kind of glossed over — where he said that the M should be characterized as its own syllable rather than an ending on the previous syllable.
This rings true to me because often the M sounds kind of stretched out, kind of syllabic (as it does in fact in this recording). So it’s Tā.m instead of Tām. Is that what you were getting at?
Posted 06 Oct 2008 at 2:33 am ¶Now, I’m going to get in trouble here.
I’m with Josh on this not being a great example – I think YU does complete the ‘men’ here. But I do think I hear the single syllable formation you describe, fairly frequently. Maybe the move from /m/ to /n/ really does still take place but doubt it’s perceptible except, perhaps, in terms of length…
Now that’s a can of worms. Obviously, there’s not much to compare the length of a would-be final /m/ with, but I suspect it’s longer (maybe ‘heavier’) than the typical final /n/. By the way, I’m still looking forward to your incisive analysis of the distinction between the final /n/ sounds of your typical laowai and a native speaker.
Anyway, I still don’t feel that the /m/ in tāmen (when the /en/ is truly dropped) is quite a syllable.
In the English word ‘rhythm’ , it seems to me that the final syllable ‘m’ really is a syllable. It’s less clear whether there’s actually a vowel – this presumably varies from speaker to speaker and context to context. But there’s at least a good case to be made that it can be a vowel-less syllable, and a meaningfully different one from the ‘mmm’ of agreement or pleasure.
But the /m/ of tāmen, perhaps because it’s preceded by an open syllable, really does feel like part of the syllable and not a second syllable as syz suggests in his response to Josh.
I note there appears not to be an honorific ’she’ – 她＋心 anybody?
Anyway, thanks for teaching me a new word and I’m with Chao’s claim that a native speaker would be able to distinguish the two sentences on the basis of the vowel alone.
Posted 06 Oct 2008 at 3:16 pm ¶If the syllable final /m/ really is there, does it suggest that Mandarin is trying to expand it’s syllabic range? How long might the syllable ‘tam’ have been around?
Chao’s ‘A Grammar of Spoken Chinese’ was published in 1968 and one would imagine that the phenomenon must have been reasonably well established for him to comment on it. He was already writing in the late twenties, so maybe he commented on it in an earlier work. Maybe it’s as old as the hills.
Even if ‘tam’ was relatively new in ‘68, surely if Chinese had a more ‘flexible’ writing system it would have established itself, to some extent, in written form by now, wouldn’t it?
If an /m/ final might be evidence of an expanding range of syllables, should our old favourite 儿化 (érhuà, rhotacization) be viewed in the same light? Are there any other signs of such expansion?
In true BJS fashion, I’ve long imagined (and maybe really detected) that 斯 (sī), when used in certain loan words, seems to lose it’s syllabic quality.
Here’s an example of a CCTV newscaster reading a report on Pakistan (there’s a short ad at the beginning):
http://tinyurl.com/3fq8cp
She uses the word Pakistan (巴基斯坦, Bājīsītǎn) twice. The second time it seems to have four syllables, as one would expect, but the in first reading it sounds like three syllables to me. The third syllable seems to be reduced to the extent that the ’s’ remains only as part of either the preceding or following syllable.
There seems to be considerable debate about whether ’si’, ‘ci’, ‘zi’, ’shi’, ‘chi’, ‘zhi’, ‘ri’ actually contain a vowel anyway, but I’m not aware of any doubts about their being syllables.
Can anyone think of, or even find, other examples?
Posted 06 Oct 2008 at 8:14 pm ¶Syz — if you say N “without really parting the lips” you’re getting pretty close to the textbook definition of an M. (Even if your tongue is in an N position, no one can hear the difference.)
I think everyone can hear the difference. Try this:
1. Put your tongue in /n/ position, vocalize, and open and close your lips. No difference, right?
2. Put your lips in /m/ position, vocalize, and raise and lower your tongue to and from the /n/ position. You can here a difference there, right?
If people couldn’t, there wouldn’t be a phonemic difference between the two nasals.
Posted 06 Oct 2008 at 8:35 pm ¶I had another thought on the “m-n” syllable. After trying it several times myself, I think the lips to actually part, but only after the tongue is already in the /n/ position, resulting in a dropped /e/. The ultimate result is more like a “tamn-” with the /-/ representing the extended nasal /n/ with the lips open.
Sima – that’s an interesting point about the 斯. I would imagine the pronunciation of a “bajis-tan” where the /i/ of si is totally dropped is probably an attempt to get closer to the original pronunciation as opposed to an overall trend in the pronunciation of Chinese. However, it would be interesting if relatively rarely used characters like 斯 could become “standardized” place holders for individual consonants that appear in non-Chinese words. i.e. 斯=s 科=k 勒=l etc.
Posted 06 Oct 2008 at 10:12 pm ¶Josh — They already have!
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 2:01 am ¶Fair enough…should have known this, but I assume it will still be some time before (the majority of) people say “feirps” instead of “fei er pu si” (in one syllable as opposed to four).
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 2:08 am ¶I’m getting jiggy with the idea that Mandarin might develop consonant clusters through analogy from foreign loan words. @Sima & Josh, is the argument something like this?
Both Pakistan (Bajistan instead of Bajisitan) and Phelps (”Feirps” instead of “fei er pu si”) are good examples.
The evidence of popularization for this phenomenon might come if Mandarin speakers were to borrow a word from a language with a less complex phonology (say, Japanese) and yet STILL apply the “reduce vowel sounds between consonants” rule. It’d be awfully cool if we could find such an example.
It occurs to me that we could even bring back Beizzhing as an analogy. The parallel would be that English speakers, starting many years ago, heard [ʒ] rather than [dʒ] in French speech. Example: English speakers say John where French speakers say Jean. And French was at one time prestigious, so English speakers decided that for any similar foreign sound they would use [ʒ] not [dʒ], regardless of which was closer to the original foreign sound (as dʒ arguably is in the native pronunciation of Beijing). Therefore we end up with Beizzhing today.
Plausible?
@Randy — I tried your m/n test and you’ve got half a point, but I don’t think it changes the fact that if you say tamn jia and DON’T part your lips, no one will hear it as tamn jia, they’ll only hear tam-m jia.
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 3:07 am ¶Whilst I remember, I picked up a copy of ‘The Phonology of Standard Chinese’ by San Duanmu, on my summer travels. I’ve by no means worked right through it yet, but would recommend it to all (both) the other poor geeks who get worked up about these things.
http://tinyurl.com/3k93tp
I should have perhaps consulted it before commenting here, but now note that on page 303 (not available throught the above link) Duanmu gives several examples of ’syllable merger’, including 我们 wǒmen. His other examples generally seem to be within the range of existing Chinese syllables, e.g. 所以 suǒyǐ (therefore) becoming ’sui’ and 就要 jiùyào (will (soon)) becoming ‘jiao’.
He also has a section on ‘Devoicing and Other Voiceless Syllables’, in which a number of examples are given, such as 豆腐 dòufu (beancurd), which becomes dou-ff. I think this partly explains what’s going on with 斯 sī, i.e. I think it too is devoiced, but he sticks with two syllables and, though I think that’s fine for dòufu, I don’t think that quite accounts of the Pakistan example I gave in the previous comment.
I like the Phelps example, Josh, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it still had a couple of syllables, not least with the final ’si’ devoiced in the same way as the ‘fu’ in ‘doufu’.
With *most* youngish educated Chinese speakers now having had exposure to English, or another foreign language, I would agree with you about getting closer to the original pronunciation and ‘feirps’, whether with one, two or even three syllables would seem to support that.
My initial feeling was that whatever the cause, it still suggests an expanding range of syllables, if only to accommodate foreign names…
but now, with the fence clasped firmly between my cheeks, I wonder whether that’s really noteworthy. As far as I’m aware, there’s no regular English syllable ‘bue’, but I’m aware of no native English speaker being much troubled by Buenos Aires.
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 3:07 am ¶syz,
Sorry, I think we commented at about the same time, but I’m thrilled at the prospect of making you a little jiggy.
You seem to have summarised things pretty well. I think plenty of other examples would be required to show that. I’d also be interested to see whether we could trace it back some way, even if only by trying to get recordings of elderly speakers who may not have had the same exposure to English (though plenty learnt Russian and I believe it’s not short of consonant clusters).
If we were to stumble across a non-loan word with such a feature, that would start to be really interesting.
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 3:18 am ¶I don’t think that English has any influence on Mandarin words having their syllables reduced; it’s a normal phonological process. Up here, less erudite people tend to slur everything together to the point where it sounds like a completely different language from what you hear on TV. I’m sure that’s true in every area of China.
Sima — There’s no syllable [bwe] in English, but “syllables” are things that are defined arbitrarily anyway. In English, those sounds can be together (subway [ˈsʌbwei]), albeit not at the beginning of a word.
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 4:30 am ¶Thanks for putting me straight on that, Randy. I was hoping there might be something along those lines, but my grey matter just wasn’t up to the task. Btw, I’ll accept that ’syllable’ is not necessarily an entirely clear concept, but I think I’ve always been prone to attach too much importance to ‘word’ as a unit of language.
I’m with you up to a point on the cause of such syllable reductions. There are certainly other processes at work, but I don’t think we can eliminate the possibility that foreign language learning might be a contributory factor in such cases.
I’m less interested in why such changes might come about, than in the notion that they may be coming about. At the moment, I don’t think a couple of recent examples are enough to show that this is either a new or significant phenomenon. But I’m intrigued.
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 5:24 am ¶There’s no syllable [bwe] in English, but “syllables” are things that are defined arbitrarily anyway. In English, those sounds can be together (subway [ˈsʌbwei]), albeit not at the beginning of a word.
Bwahaha! Randy, wrong again
Posted 07 Oct 2008 at 7:21 am ¶:^)
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