On the V in Beijing Dialect and a new translation of River Snow
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You probably remember hearing Jimi Hendrix for the first time when he sang, “Scuze me, while I kiss this guy.”
“Hey,” you thought, “kinda makes sense. After all, it was the 60s, experimentation was all the rage, purple haze was floating around…”
Until you were talking about it around the pool table one dormitory afternoon after classes, and some blowhard called you out on your incredible unhipness in not knowing “kiss the sky.” [update 18 Apr 09 -- just came across this LL reference, with sound files, for those of you who like this stuff]
And so you became one of them, another blowhard smugly correcting the next generation of fools and secretly fearing that someone, some day, would recall that you had once been a fool yourself.
A New Interpretation
Let’s hope there’s less risk of blowhardiness about the 8th/9th century works of Liǔ Zōngyuán (柳宗元), whose “River Snow” poem PBS happens to be memorizing at the present time.
Here’s her liberal translation of the third line, which reads “孤舟蓑笠翁” / “gū zhōu suō lì wēng”:
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“zhōu” is that kind of “zhōu”, Hángzhōu, nèizhǒng “zhōu”
“Zhou” is that kind of “zhou”, Hangzhou [city], that kind of “zhou”
“gū zhōu” jiùshì¹ — it’s a teeny “zhōu”
“Gu zhou” is really — it’s a teeny “zhou”
W-E-N-G, wēng, gū zhōu suō lì wēng
翁 — 孤舟蓑笠翁
[reciting the third line of the poem]gū zhōu suō lì wēng — let me thinking –
I’m thinking what that means
gū — zhōu — suō — lì — wēng
gū zhōu suō lì wēng — every day it’s getting smaller
suō lì! and it’s getting lower
suō lì wēng — that means, uh, even
it’s gonna — wēng — remember?
bumble bees go “wēng wēng wēng wēng…”
I think! Buzz?
The bumble bee says buzz — buzz buzz buzz?
“wēng,” that means “buzz.” And it’s getting like a
bumble bee’s buzz — that small of a town.
To paraphrase, the translation reduces to something like “a town becoming as small as the buzz of a bumble bee.”*
For a less authoritative translation, see this site:
A hundred mountains and no bird,
A thousand paths without a footprint;
A little boat, a bamboo cloak,
An old man fishing in the cold river-snow.
Does Mandarin have a /v/?
The BJS studios are all about 21st century language, not 9th, but there is a connection here. If you’ve spent any time in the capital (and as usual, I’m not sure how far this phenomenon extends geographically) you’ve probably done a double take as you heard somebody answer a cell phone and say “Véi?”
Véi?! Clearly the word is wéi in all the books. What’s more, Mandarin doesn’t even have a V, anywhere, right?
I’d always written it off to weird localism. And indeed you could say it is, if it’s not widespread. But it’s there, and not just in one word. That was what stuck out for me in “wēng” above. Several times there is a hint of a “vēng” to it. Here are a few instances pulled from the clip above:
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As with “green cauliflower” as a word for “broccoli”, I was wondering if the phenomenon was no more than a family tic until I recently came across this footnote from Chao p.20 in his Grammar of Spoken Chinese:
In the case of a final beginning with a semivowel [i, u, iu]… there is with some speakers a (non-distinctive) slightly more consonantal articulation… some speakers even use a non-frictional dentilabial [ʋ]** instead of [w] though this last phonetic feature is more common in Tianjin than in Beijing.
Any Tianjin folks out there who could vouch for the prevalence of this pronunciation?
Ah, good old Chao. So he knew way back in the day that the Beijing bumble bee (and maybe the Tianjin one as well) is likely to say “veng.” His book continues to demonstrate that Beijing Sounds will never discover something he hadn’t already carefully documented back in the 1960s. But fair enough — I should probably be thanking him. To be humble is an effective antidote to blowhardism.
———–
¹Like how much of that /sh/ is missing in jiùshì? Check out this post for more discussion about dropping /sh/, /zh/ etc.
*If anyone’s half as amused as I was, I’ll edit the sound file down so I can post her entire explication, including a reference to 10,000 dead people.
**i.e. something v-like but not exactly the English /v/ — I can’t figure out how to get the IPA symbol in there. Thanks, Kellen, for providing the symbol. You can listen to a textbook version of it here, both in initial and intervocalic positions
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Comments 28
i’ve certainly never heard /v/ (or more likely /ʋ/ which may be the IPA character you were going for) in the wu-dialect area. it always takes much speech path style coaching to get anyone here to make anything close. couldn’t tell you about tianjin but it’s certainly not widespread enough to make it this far south.
Posted 26 Oct 2008 at 9:44 am ¶Kellen, thanks for the script-v. I put it into the post up above.
Are you trying to coach Wu folks to make an English [v] sound? Hadn’t thought about that before, but it’d make sense that v-coaching should be easier, then, in Beijing. You could just have the student start with the [ʋ] that they’re already able to make, and the [v] wouldn’t be far behind. (Well, maybe. Or, on the other hand, maybe it doesn’t make it that much easier cuz [ʋ] in English just sounds like kind of a lazy/drunken [v]!)
Posted 26 Oct 2008 at 3:32 pm ¶the other problem is they may not be aware of the /ʋ/ that they are already making, so it may actually be easier to present /v/ as it’s own sound. usually i show them the difference in voicing between /s/ and /z/ and then have them apply that to /f/ since 福 isn’t some linguistic rarity to them.
i find that most people, like native speakers of any language, aren’t really very aware of what sounds they’re actually making.
Posted 26 Oct 2008 at 7:05 pm ¶yeah, now that I think about it you’re absolutely right that [ʋ] wouldn’t be pedagogically useful at all.
The other comment, “aren’t really very aware of what sounds they’re actually making” is something I groove on. I still claim that those people who can’t hear the /n/ in the L=N post are in just that category. Then again, sometimes I hear special voices that no one else can hear…
Posted 27 Oct 2008 at 5:45 am ¶the L = N (or rather N = L) thing is rampant in nanjing (or as i now call it, “lanjing”). there’s largely no concept of the two sounds as different.
though a similar problem happens among english speakers where the chinese sh (e.g. 书) and the chinese x (e.g. 须) get lumped in as the english sh (e.g. shoe) which really neither quite are. many people have trouble hearing the difference.
i know you know what im talking about without the examples as i’m sure your chinese abilities far exceed my own, but to be honest i just like typing chinese sometimes.
Posted 27 Oct 2008 at 11:38 am ¶Glad to hear about the Lanjing connection — I’ve always wanted to get more specific on the geography of L/N confusion.
Alas, my “chinese abilities” exceed only those of a modestly successful elephant and definitely reside on the barren plateau of the (thanks, sinosplice, for the kick-in-the-pants humility) stage 3 category.
Posted 28 Oct 2008 at 3:22 pm ¶Yeah, I often hear a “vei” from Northerners in “wei,” esp. 因为’s 为. Yiiiin-vei.
Posted 29 Oct 2008 at 12:23 pm ¶Good point, Dylan. It does seem to be more pronounced (literally) on certain words, and 因为 is one of those. Are you hearing Northerners outside of Beijing? If so, where?
Posted 29 Oct 2008 at 4:38 pm ¶In grad school I remember encountering a paper on this northern phenomenon… I believe it’s supposed to be most common among youngish females. Don’t have much firsthand experience with it myself, though.
Of course, in Shanghai we hear lots of /v/ thanks to Shanghainese…
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 9:38 pm ¶John: “youngish females” — well, almost-7-yr-old pbs probably doesn’t deserve the -ish. The person who I can think of saying véi most prominently is my (Beijing native) 35-yr-old brother-in-law. I’ll have to pay more demographic attention, though, since you mention it.
In my deep ignorance of all things outside Beijing (not to mention most things within), I wasn’t aware that Shanghainese had a /v/. If wikipedia is to be believed, I see it doesn’t have a /w/ though, which would make you think… Have you ever heard native Shanghainese carry over the v-sound when speaking Mandarin? It would kinda make sense if they did.
Posted 30 Oct 2008 at 10:38 pm ¶I’ve been hearing “vei” from my Chinese literature professor, who’s from Changchun. I also had a friend from Inner Mongolia that quite reliably that turned “wei” into “vei.”
They’re both youngish females, too, which corresponds with what John said.
Posted 31 Oct 2008 at 6:35 am ¶On page 24 of this book, it says that [ʋ] is just a widespread allophone (non-phonemic) for [w].
Posted 03 Nov 2008 at 7:17 pm ¶I always thought that only Shanghainese used a /v/ sound in their speech (which is why they say DeeVeeDee instead of DeeWayDee). I used to hear it practically every day from a Chinese teacher who would always end sentences with ‘devala?’ (I think the putonghua equivalent might be ‘对不对?’) It’s interesting to hear that it creeps in up north too.
Posted 25 Nov 2008 at 3:04 pm ¶Kingsley, your comment reminds me that I meant to put in a disclaimer on my sloppy notation. I’m not trying to say (and I don’t know of anyone who does say) that any Mandarin dialect has a /v/ where /v/ indicates a phoneme separate from /w/. Rather, as Randy says above, [ʋ] is just an allophone of [w]; i.e. you could say either one and it wouldn’t make much difference in terms of meaning.
In Wu (Shanghainese Wu, at least) on the other hand, my understanding is that /v/ (i.e.[ʋ]) and /w/ are phonemes quite distinct from each other — but I’m not knowledgeable on this and open to correction.
That’s all a long way of saying that the [ʋ] may not have crept north from Shanghai but is quite likely just an element of natural variation within Mandarin.
Posted 27 Nov 2008 at 5:21 am ¶I noticed the “v” plain as day on my language tapes ages ago, but I just got a deer-caught-in-headlights look from my teacher when I asked about it. ‘pears to be like the Castilian ‘lithp’ in Spanish–more of a regional thing. Also, notice that to do this particular northern Mandarin dental-labial thingy right, you put allow the upper teeth the slightest lower lip lip-graze.
Cheers!
Posted 27 Nov 2008 at 8:13 am ¶My past Chinese teacher was originally from Tianjin and he used the [ʋ] pronunciation. In fact, before I knew any better, I used the [ʋ] pronunciation too because I picked it up from him, and some people would give me a puzzled look because of that.
Posted 22 Dec 2008 at 3:17 pm ¶Good stuff, Claw. I’d put that in the category of Chinese believing that foreigners should speak biāozhǔn / straight standard Mandarin rather than anything remotely localized. Even happens with my own mother-in-law (see this post) despite my having learned a lot of my Mandarin from her.
But in defense of the Chinese, I think that’s sorta true all over. Even Americans, quite accustomed to foreigners who speak English well, might be surprised to find an intermediate speaker with signs of, say, a Texan accent.
Posted 24 Dec 2008 at 10:02 pm ¶Yup, hear lots of it here in Tianjin. Malcolm (15) described the lip graze well. When I first started studying in the states, I was surprised to learn that both wan2 and var2 mean play–one learned from the text book and one from my wife. I tease her that her Chinese sort of sounds like a German accent in a cheesy WW2 movie (or Hogan’s Heroes). I’ve picked it up myself and I find it sounds awkward to my ear now when I use a w sound.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 12:56 am ¶@Malcolm: Like Jim in TJ, I like the “lip graze” description too. exactly right.
@Jim in TJ — sounds like the lip graze is decidedly more prevalent in TJ. If you get really inspired could you send me a recording? either your wife, or your own Zhonglish if you’re bold :^)
BTW, sorry your comment got delayed. I’m having mysterious and disturbing problems with my blog’s database and had not been able to approve it until today.
Posted 10 Jan 2009 at 8:50 pm ¶The “V” is very common in northern speech. It’s not always the harshest and most obvious “V” sound (it can range to quite subtle to very obvious), but I hear it all the time from Northerners. I (white guy) picked it up, and say “vei4 shen2me?”
Also, most dictionaries list 因為 as yin1wei4, but my girlfriend swears to death that the “proper” pronunciation is “yin1wei2.” Oh, yeah… she’s from Tianjin.
Posted 04 Feb 2009 at 7:40 am ¶I don’t really worry about the technicalities of exactly what kind of v sound it is but, have experienced correction ping-pong of my pronounciation between two friends who help me with Chinese. Words like wang 网 are pronounced with a distinct v sound according to one friend and not according to another.
The v in this case is not as strong as a German would pronounce in “Wagen” but is is distinctly there. My v pronouncing friend doesn’t really recognise it exactly as such so they are probably hearing something considerably softer than a hard European v but plenty of English accents have a softer v (to my ears) which is why I guess I see them as so similar.
The v user is Beijinger through and through, the none v speaker was born in Sichuan but seems to have lived in various parts of Southern China as well and she doesn’t (in fact can’t) pronounce the full zh, sh sounds (I don’t either when talking with her because she gets embarrassed when teaching me a new word and I use them, so I follow her lead).
Having been exposed to a variety of English accents though none of this is very surprising.
What does surprise me is that occasionally people seem to expect Mandarin to have a similar pronunciation over the whole of vast China etc. (I am not suggesting that is what is happening here) when there is such a huge variation of English over a tiny area encompassing the British Isles.
Now the Chinese are used to their own localized variations, when after time they get used to additional variations from differing varieties of foreigners (as most native English speaker have) it will be a lot easier for novice Mandarin speakers to make themselves understood.
I am told Da Shan speaks Mandarin with excellent pronunciation, maybe he will work on his English next, still sounds a little too Canadian for me. Obviously tongue is firmly in cheek but I hope you can see my point.
Posted 07 Feb 2009 at 4:13 am ¶Chris,
I think part of the the thing is, unless you are speaking excellent chinese with one particular accent (beijing, southern, etc) and it is very consistently following that accent and you are speaking at a high level, chinese people, if you are on friendly terms with them or are asking them advice (implying you are a learner), will kind of assume you are, well, a learner, and won’t take you that seriously. On the other hand, if you are chinese, or really asian, and they can rationally assume you might speak chinese, have chinese blood, or speak a closely related language, they will with all their might do the best to comprehend and rarely correct you.
A chinese person once said to me when dealing with foreigners with chinese ancestry, even if it was clear that chinese wasn’t their mother tongue and they were just learning it, that they had like a duty, like they had to understand it, or it was a 丢脸 moment. With other people, it’s like, they are foriegners, if I understand them, then great, if not I don’t, if I care, I’ll tell them how I say it.
It’s not so much a matter of getting used to foreign speakers of your ‘native tongue’, chinese ‘deal’ 忍受 korean or japanese speakers who’s bad pronunciations of chinese rival any other group kind of because they are asian and one wouldn’t want to assume that the asian person doesn’t have chinese blood or a chinese background. Attacking another potential chinese person who’s pronunciation is off in some places is nearly out of the question for a chinese person. throwing stones in glass houses.
When a Tianjin speaker goes to a mandarin speaker and shoots out some funny toned sentence the mandarin speaker doesn’t blink an eye, that’s just tianjinhua, but a foreigner fucking up tones is a moment to add correction. A foreigner who spoke as if tianjin was his mother tongue I bet wouldn’t register any response either, perhaps after a quick mention.
This also kind of goes both ways, I don’t find myself correcting russian speakers of english for their accents and mispronunciations, unless its completely incomprehensible. Their way of speaking english and their prounciation is rigid and follows a pattern and is understood. But, their errors are within a certain threshold of acceptable. Chinese speakers of english on the other hand not often are completely incomprehnsible, but also make some errors that are simply unacceptable to an english speaker for any person, (plural/singular confusion, he/she confusion, etc). Also, the manner of speech, the speed, the stress, etc, when speaking english has to be somewhat close to english. Russian speakers, french canadian speaker, jamaican speakers of english certainly all have their own styles, but they all sound like they are speaking a language. Chinese people often sound like they aren’t speaking a language when they are speaking english, but rather a pile or link of words one after another. (Japanese speakers can often sound like this as well). This no doubt comes from schooling and the emphasis on word after word after word. Their classes are often (or at least were) like this.
REPEAT:
Teacher: MY MA-THER IS A TE-CHER.
Students shout in response: MY MA-THER IS A TE-CHER.
repeat ad infinitum.
Needless to say this has disastrous consequences. What’s so odd is chinese as a language flows and moves just like most other languages do, such as english, but getting learners to mimic that is often impossible in later years. The same sad situation applies to mandarin speakers who after years are still talking as if each tone has to be pronounced and the the idea of flow and language stress doesn’t exist. Part of that comes from media chinese where the language to an incredible degree does disregard sentence-based stress and becomes this sort of parody of teacher-talk (watch Hu Jintao speeches or any straight news program on tv, and then compare this to say, pre-media chinese, say mao zedong speeches, where flow existed). Note media chinese doesn’t have to be a death knell, in taiwan the media often sounds much further away from a parody of itself.
Posted 07 Feb 2009 at 2:11 pm ¶Thanks hsknotes, that is food for thought (a very useful comment). It kind of explains my experiences, I have had short conversations with Chinese people with no correction, but as you point out friends will still see me as a learner as they know my many limitations.
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 6:58 am ¶@Steven, I’m almost 100% certain that yin1wei2 thing is not confined to Tianjin. Glad you pointed it out, since that tends to indicate the weird tone vibe I get from it is not just a result of my faulty hearing. Maybe this will push it up higher on the list of future topics (a list that’s growing faster than the roster of TARP recipients)
@Chris, that idea that “people seem to expect Mandarin to have a similar pronunciation over the whole of vast China” was part of what sparked Beijing Sounds in the first place. I started realizing that people hardly agreed on the standard (putonghua) in the first place, not to mention that a lot of the Beijing words I was hearing didn’t seem to follow it. “Beijing Sounds” was sort of a capitulation on the “it’s supposed to be this way or that way” battles. Let’s just document the sounds that are out there, and where they’re spoken, and leave it at that!
@hsknotes, you really think there’s a big difference in how locals correct a non-Chinese vs, say, an ABC? I have been thinking for a while that the Beijingers who interact with me (an obvious foreigner) seem to be much more forgiving of my Zhonglish than I sometimes wish they were — i.e. not correcting me even when it’s way, way off. Mentally, I’ve chalked that up to having to deal with so many waidiren with accents all over the board. That leads to the hypothesis that Beijingers, generally, would be better able to comprehend heavily accented speech than, say, country folks. But now that I put it that way, I see you could guess the same thing about, say, New York City vs. Benton City, Washington.
The Russian-English vs Chinese-English idea is even juicier. I find myself mostly nodding agreement. The he/she confusion is extremely jolting even for someone like me who has been accommodating it for years. It seems to interfere much more with comprehension than other errors.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to document the reverse: are there certain foreign accents in Mandarin that most native speakers find appealing? Are they all equally jarring? Which errors are the most offensive?
Finally (since that was a whale of a comment!) it’s eye-opening but not shocking to hear about the syllable-by-syllable ESL pedagogy. I have no experience with local teachers, so this is all new to me.
One of the things that makes my head spin, and may be related, is when I hear locals read out written Mandarin aloud. Very often the spoken rhythms disappear and you’re left with a barrage of inseparable staccato quarter notes. I find it 10 times harder to comprehend, not just (I think) because the vocabulary is generally richer in written language but specifically because I find it much harder to identify word barriers that I think I’d find straightforward to hear in regular conversation. Think there’s any connection?
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 11:00 am ¶若干的问题
I’ve always hated 若干, by the whey.
I still, to this day could not tell you the deal with 因为.
Syz, not only do I know, about the treatment of ‘asian’ faces, have seen the treatments, and discussed and cofrimed it with chinese nationals, I figured it out when I was still taking classes in college. The chinese student who enters with all her/his sh,ch,zh all ’southernized’ to ’s,c,z’ isn’t even worthy of a mention to the rest of the class. But no one else is allowed to talk like that.
What you have to understand is, chinese people have a real ’special’ understand of ethnicity, identity, nationality, etc.(If you’re looking for a good time, get into a serious discussion of the terms chinese-american, 华裔，华侨，美籍华人，ABC， and their related connotations and meanings in chinese and english) It’s hard talking with many chinese people about chinese americans, because to them, they’re just chinese. Them speaking bad mandarin, or not knowing things causes them to be looked down upon, “they don’t even know their own language!” Now of course this isn’t everybody, but it certainly isn’t uncommon. They tend to, in my opinion, put all ‘waidi’ zhongguoren in the same category. So an ethnically chinese person from Malaysia gets bundled with Wang Lihong. (No I will not type his name out correctly.) The thing is, everyone knows Wang Lihong’s chinese either ’sucks’ or is at least really really american, but they won’t say that very often. The point is, he has nothing to do with the kind of chinese that 梁静茹 speaks.
This can get more complicated because many chinese americans can speak or understand a lot of cantonese and then when it comes to mandarin shit hits the fan.
“foreign” accents gets us into some “murky” water. For a long time the ‘prestige’ accent for girly ’sexy’ mandarin has been the taiwan accent. That’s why Zhang Ziyi talks like that (even though no one from of her age group from the mainland talks like that naturally.) Everyone kind of sounded like Gong Li, deep, serious, not Kawaii.
I’ve got the impression that chinese people don’t like how japanese people sound when they speak chinese, but that could be related to a few other things.
What’s weird is, I’ve never met a chinese person tell me they are especially irritated by a foreign accent (perhaps with korean being an exception, but likely due to living in beijing). Never once, even with horrifically bad pronunciation did I find my teachers willing to just burst and shout at them or lecture them after class or even discuss their travails with the other students after class.
This whole ‘read-aloud’ bullshit is a whole other bag of worms. I mean, just look at how many words there are in chinese for it. The whole read-aloud universe, chinese, english, memorization, learning theories is truly astonishing and I believe one of the serious contributors to poor english among the youth. Crazy English is filled with that whole read-aloud philosophy…I’m going to stop now, I can’t even talk about it anymore.
My observation is chinese teachers don’t really know or understand how to make you sound like a native speaker when you are talking. If your tones are really bad, they want to help you less and less (barring extreme beginners). If you speak in a decent way, they will pick at your tones because that’s the only thing that they really have faith in doing. This goes both ways, helping foreign learners, particularly chinese learners, understand sentence and word based stress is a lot more difficult to grasp and teach than say, fixing obvious prounciation errors. But still, I would be in advanced classes and people would be speaking essentially ‘americanized mandarin’. If there were tones they were so cloaked in the standard style of speaking english (senetence stress, word stress, etc) that it didn’t make a difference. This really got on my nerves and pretty much drove me to seriously attacking the school/teachers/methodology and reconsider ever taking classes with people again. You can sometimes here this when say, an italian speaks chinese. You can hear they really haven’t identified that you can’t speak every language the way you speak italian. (Or perhaps you can because chinese people seem pretty forgiving if you bothered to learn their little (spoken by hundreds of millions of people) language).
That’s it, I’m done.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 7:57 pm ¶Isn’t this `v’ sound really a bilabial fricative? The
a lowercase Greek beta in IPA transcription.
The /v/ we use in English (and in most v-using
languages) is made with the top teeth touching the
bottom lip. Standard IPA describes that as a
labio-dental fricative.
But if one uses only the lips, that’s bilabial: the
lips are close together, tensed up, the air
comes out and a vibration occurs. The lips
are more tense than for a basic /w/, which
is also of very short duration, whereas a
fricative, by definition, takes longer.
The script-v symbol [ʋ] that’s appeared in a
few posts is still a labio-dental — my Pullum
and Ladusaw calls it a `voiced labiodental
frictionless continuant’ … oh, the joys of an
IPA description, eh?!
I noticed this v-sound early on in my teachers,
) Native speakers
who were of course typical native speakers:
`That’s a /w/ of course!’
are notorious for not knowing the sounds
they make! Ask anyone who’s done phonetic
field work
As for the use of the letter `w’ in pinyin, I think
this may be because the feature `bilabial’ is
perceived as being more significant than the
`fricative’ feature, and thus `w’ wins over
`v’, as far as a representative letter goes.
Ch.
P.S. I just found this site and have been having a
… but this is soooo much
Posted 11 Feb 2009 at 11:26 pm ¶grand time poking through all the stuff. I should be
working of course
more fun!
Hi ChT, thanks for dropping by. I’ve actually thought about the idea that it could be a bilabial, but I find myself falling on the side of dentilabial because
1. That’s what I’m pretty sure I can see PBS doing
2. Chao says the same thing (and he’s so far always been right)
I see your argument about how the whole “w in pinyin” thing might seem to indicate a bilabial would be more likely. But it looks more dental to me. More importantly, for many speakers there is no V sound at all and it really is a pure W, so that would explain how the W ended up there in Pinyin.
Posted 13 Feb 2009 at 8:54 pm ¶hsk, I think you’re right on the Chinese impression of waidi Chinese speaking Chinese.
But… I think waidi Chinese are often more capable of producing a standardized non-standard Chinese, you know?
The kids in my class with parents that speak Chaozhou hua at home or whatever really speak some crazy, wrong Mandarin but they’re more likely to be able to produce something that a Chinese teacher can understand, so it gets a pass. Like, mispronouncing 他是中国人 as Tā sī Zōngguó rén is better than mispronouncing it as Táw súre Zháwng-gwóoh rén.
Posted 27 Mar 2009 at 10:46 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[l] / [n] substitution in the nanjing dialect…
…i’ve been trading comments with syz over at Beijing Sounds via the his post “the humble-v says veng veng” re some of the sounds that come up in different dialects of chinese……
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