Comments on: Statistical analysis: Zhonglish-Chinglish conference a success

By: syz

syz — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:02:31 +0000

@Tzm: I dunno about “hardest to say,” but the 儿化音 in that video is gold! Might have to do something with that, especially given the host’s comment about how it is “qīnrè” (亲热 = intimate / affectionate) and so on. Very cool.

@Mikael & Zev: Very intriguing possibilities for social implications / stigmatized speech. Wish we had more native Mandarin speakers to weigh in with their sense of this. Maybe it calls for further investigation too, along the lines of asking some of my usual suspects what they think about the person (social status, etc.) who says něi.

@Zev: you’ve got me salivating over the paper, even if I can only read it for the pictures :^). I assume you don’t know where to snag an electronic copy? If you don’t know any of the authors yourself, I might try sending them an email to see if we can get it.

By: Zev Handel

Zev Handel — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:27:36 +0000

Zhèi, nèi, and něi are of course fusions of zhè yī, nà yī, and nǎ yī. By analogy their use has spread to situations where the non-contracted forms could not occur, such as zhèi liǎngge rén (*zhè yīliǎngge rén). The result is that across the population of Mandarin speakers there is variation between such forms as nǎge, nǎ yíge, and něige, and sometimes such variation will be found in a single speaker. Some variant forms in language are barely noticed by speakers (consider the two pronunciations of “either” in English), while others (consider the two pronunciations of “creek” or “roof” in English) tend to be quite salient and may be strongly stigmatized by certain speech communities. It appears that něi falls into the latter category. I wonder if anybody has done any socio-linguistic studies on usage and language attitudes related to these variant forms?