Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On how to give away T-shirts, a taxicab Tāngr-Tāng recap with a bit of Zhonglish, and the bonus: a groundbreaking announcement for the 2009 conference

Think subsets. And subsets of subsets. If you found everyone in the world who was interested in the intricacies of spoken Mandarin, then you sliced off just those with a particular interest in dialect variation (especially with respect to Beijing dialect), then among them you took only those who could speak English — well, the size of your subset would be shrinking rapidly.

But then let’s say you invite all those folks to dinner. Now the able-to-participate subset must be in Beijing and willing to haul themselves (on a Monday night no less) out beyond the fifth ring road to the Shangdi light rail station…

Given the formidable hoop-jumping, I’m pleased and honored that the November 17 conference was packed with five other folks besides myself, PBS, and Mrs. BJS. And with the inevitable exception of yours truly, the intellectual firepower was quite daunting.

Now the extravaganza has come and gone. Syz has come and gone as well, reluctantly returning to the land of ice fishing and The Mall just days ago, but with no shortage of gifts from Beijing to keep him warm (low-grade fever) and sentimental (deep hacking cough accompanied by phlegm-clearing to rival something heard on Cháng’ān Jiē) in his desolate and unwelcoming apartment.

Oh, you can’t expect champagne and a freakin’ welcoming committee — get over it already.

The T-shirts have come and (almost) gone as well:

Here’s the reference to the Tāngr-Tāng distinction. So for you five other readers who weren’t actually at the conference, now you know what you were missing!

Oh, what’s that? Really? It wasn’t the T-shirt? But what’s not to covet in a cheap iron-on that bled pink around the edges? I mean, you wouldn’t come for what one guest termed “geeky, intense conversation” now, would you? Or for some words of -ngr wisdom from PBS (who was entertained enough to fall asleep on a row of chairs)? Or for a side conversation with Mrs. BJS? (who tolerated the manifest foolishness quite admirably)

Apply for yours today

Since even a free dinner, apparently, was insufficient incentive to move all of our admittedly low-quality product, the BJS marketing committee has come up with a new scheme. Although they acknowledge that past contests have yielded a participation rate of precisely zero, they hope against experience that the following contest will be different.

Here’s the gist of it:

Free T-shirt to the first two people to send a note about their favorite Beijing/Mandarin sound.

Rules:

1. Your story has to be about a sound related to Beijing or Mandarin
2. Sound/video file is optional but highly, highly encouraged
3. First come first served

Fine print:

1. No, I’m not going to publish any of your story without your permission. Don’t be so paranoid.
2. Tell me if you want the Medium or the Medium (sorry it’s likely to be too small — give it to your favorite daughter, niece, whatever)
3. Unlike past vaporware giveaways, I really do have these T-shirts. However, it may literally be months before I get them sent off, depending on China travel plans and where you’re located. So don’t put it in your wardrobe planning just yet.

Tāngr-Tāng recap

Did you ever find yourself bothered by the Tāngr-Tāng distinction? [No? That's all right, you can still read on.] It’s true that the original post follows the constitutional requirement [link] that “it’s gotta be researched,” but a sample size of one does stretch the definition of “research.” Even if you grant that PBS is clear on the difference, and so is YU, it’s also true that the former might just have picked up the idiosyncrasy from the latter.

Thanks, then, to conference participant Christian for bringing up the subject in a taxi the day after the event. Here’s how the conversation went:
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Christian:
Tángr gēn táng [unclear]
汤儿跟汤…
Tangr and tang…

Driver:
Tángr?
汤儿？
Tangr? [with wrong tone]

SYZ:
Bùshì, bùshì. Tāngr. Tā shuō “tāngr”, jiùshì, nèige, “tāngr” gēn “tāng” — yīyàng de yìsi ma?
不是，不是。汤儿。他说“汤儿”就是那个“汤儿”跟“汤”，一样的意思吗？
No, no — tangr. He said tangr — that is, the — tangr and tang — do they have the same meaning?

Driver:
Wǒ méi tīng qīng. Něi liǎnggè zìr?
我没听清。哪两个字儿？
I didn’t hear clearly. What two characters?

SYZ:
Jiùshì nèige “hē tāng” de nèige “tāng” gēn nèige érhuàyīn de nèige tāngr. Wàiguórén bùhǎo shuō, shìbushì? Kěshì, nèige “tāngr” gēn “tāng” yīyàng de yìsi ma?
就是那个“喝汤”的那个“汤”跟那个儿化音的那个“汤儿”。外国人不好说，是不是？ 可是那个“汤儿”跟“汤”一样的意思吗？
It’s the “drink tang” kind of tang and the rhoticized (er-ized) kind of tangr. Foreigners have a hard time saying it, right? But that tangr and tang — do they have the same meaning?

Driver:
Bùyīyàng.
不一样。
No, not the same.

SYZ:
Bùyīyàng, zěnme bùyīyàng? Wǒ háiméi míngbai zhèige… Tāngr shì shénme?
不一样，怎么不一样？我还没明白这个。。。“汤儿”是什么？
Not the same — how is it not the same? I still don’t understand this… what is tangr?

Driver:
Wǒ rènwéi* nèige tāngr ā. Jiùshì xiàng, zhèige, chǎo, yībān de chǎo cài lǐtou, nèige, [unclear] de nèige zhīr. Nèige jiùshì, zhèige “yǒu yīdiǎnr tāngr ā zhèige”. Dì èr* tāng ā, jiùshì zhuānménr zuò yī pénr tāng.
我认为那个汤儿啊。就是象，这个，炒，一般的炒菜里头，那个，（？）的那个汁儿。 那个就是这个“有一点儿汤儿啊这个”。第二汤啊，就是专门儿做一盆儿汤。
I think that tangr. It’s like this, fried — usually in a fried dish [of food], that, (?) that “juice”. That’s really this “this has a little bit of tangr“. The second tang, well, it’s really a specially made pot of tang [i.e. soup].

SYZ:
à, à. Míngbai le.
啊。啊。明白了。
Oh, oh. I understand.

Driver:
Nèige tāngr, jiùshì yǒu yīdiǎnr, tāngr jiùshì shǎo.
那个汤儿，就是有一点儿，“汤儿”就是少。
That tangr — it really has just a little — tangr is something there’s very little of.

SYZ:
OK

Driver:
Shìbushì. Dàgài jiùshì zhèige yìsi
是不是？ 大概就是这个意思。
Right? Generally it has this meaning.

SYZ:
à, à. Míngbai le.
啊。啊。明白了。
Oh, oh. I understand.

*Update: thanks to Albert & Zev in comments for the transcription help here.

Analysis 1: Zhonglish

With the radio running, it’s hard to hear much of what Christian says, but he clearly asks about tangr and tang using the second tone for both when they should be the first. Poor guy, you might be thinking. Just one utterance in a very bad recording and already the BJS analysts are picking on his Zhonglish.

Whoa now, hang on — as all followers of the Zhonglish series know [see here for a starting point], there are no bullies in Zhonglish-town. Nobody’s picking on anybody — we’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.

First for a bit of background, Christian’s pronunciation is generally quite good and there’s no question that he would know the right tones if you asked him. This seems like a classic case of interference from English prosodic features. It’s one that trips me up all the time, but I’ve never recorded an instance that seems so clear cut.

Just imagine for a second that there are two words you’re not quite sure how to pronounce: muhm and muhum. Moreover, you’re trying to ask someone whether the two words actually mean the same thing. So you ask something like:

Do muhm and muhum mean the same thing?

Ask the question carefully, somewhat hesitantly on the two key words. What do you get? For me, the exercise clearly gives a rising tone for each word, just as if each one was a question. And my guess is that this interference that causes Christian to botch a couple of tones he generally knows quite well.

I’m of the depressing opinion, just from my own experience, that sentence-level intonational instincts are very hard to overcome.

Analysis 2: Our driver

Naturally it takes the driver a second to understand the question. First, he’s asking about the wrong word, tángr, because that’s what Christian said. But even after I repeat the question with the right tones (but still not quite the right pronunciation of -ngr — I may never get that right), he’s asking for clarification.

Driver:
Wǒ méi tīng qīng. Něi liǎnggè zìr?
我没听清。哪两个字儿？
I didn’t hear clearly. What two characters?

This is the first time I recall hearing 哪, which is usually nǎ, pronounced as něi. At first I thought I was hearing it wrong or that it was something else entirely, but a quick look on my Pleco shows that the ABC dictionary lists něi as a pronunciation of 哪.

Other than that, to my ear he sounds like a typical Beijinger, with plenty of the usual phonetic elements:
1. Rhoticization / er-ization / the Beijing-R
See zìr, zhīr, zhuānménr, pénr

2. Consonant elision [see this post for more detail]
Mostly jiùshì turning into jiùshì with sort of a /h/ instead of the /sh/

3. Consistent zhèi/nèi not zhè/nà (for 这/那) [see here for more]

Analysis 3: tangr and tang

The gravy on all this is having irrefutable confirmation that tāngr and tāng refer to two different things. The former is the sauce/juice that settles out of any stirfried dish. The latter is just soup. Just like PBS and YU said. No more lingering doubts.

Announcement: Zhonglish-Chinglish Conference to admit women in 2009

In trumpeting the success of this year’s conference, I don’t mean to imply that there were no snafus. To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, you don’t know which unexpected event will happen, but you should consider it inevitable that some unexpected event will take place and change the course of events as you might have planned them out.

For the Nov 17 conference, we might have anticipated the usual protesters: those insulted at the vivisection of poorly-formed Mandarin and/or English; those incensed at the publication of less-than-harmonious children’s doggerel…

Whodathunk, though, that what would end up broadsiding the conference would be the advocates for women’s equal access?

You had to admit they had a point. Aside from the token presence of PBS and Mrs. BJS — whose names, they might have pointed out, represent all the patriarchal erasure of women’s identities perpetrated for centuries in Western culture — this was just another conference of six men in the traditional smoky room (even if it was in fact the smoke seeping over from the adjacent room in our Shangdi dining establishment).

With smoky rooms goes the power of the RMB. To be perfectly honest: none of the male conference participants mentioned any plans to set aside some of the burgeoning (some would say: obscene) wealth of Beijing Sounds for the betterment of anyone but themselves.

As of 2009, though, all this will change. Inspired to the call of inclusion management hereby declares an aggressive effort will be made to recruit at least one of the two known female readers for next year’s conference.

In addition, to show the goodwill of management in going beyond the call of statutory requirements, the 2009 organizing committee has promised to make an additional effort to recruit preteen females so as to prevent the eye-rolling boredom that plagued certain factions of this year’s conference.

Don’t forget those T-shirt applications!