Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On proper vocabulary, rethinking the third tone, and the Hànzì thought police

It was still before 8 a.m. when the staccato cacophony of metal on tile shocked Mr. Zhao out of bed.

Mere mortal sleepers might have been awakened long ago on this Shangdi Saturday morning, what with the constant pattering of feet, the grinding drone of an overloaded washing machine, the beating of stick on rug…

But anyone of Mr. Zhao’s tenure in residence underneath the living quarters of the Beijing Sounds cast either knows their sedatives well or has come to an enlightened understanding of which sounds may be considered soporific. Zhao learned months ago to snuggle deeper into the covers as the upstairs unit finished the week’s wash, beat the dust out of a rug or two, and had a hearty breakfast of eggs, fāmiànrbǐng (发面儿饼 = a flat, leavened pan-bread), and milk well before a comparable American family* would have stumbled downstairs to pour the Cheerios.

The gentle grumble of the washing machine, the pleasant rhythm of the rug-cleaning activities — for Mr. Zhao it’s all enough to feel almost womb-like.

Until the crash.

That would be the sound of the (formerly) height-adjustable parallel bar clothes-drying apparatus, repaired jerryrigged by syz in a fashion that would earn a safety citation at a Liaoning mine, plummeting to earth, burying child and grandma in a tragedy of greasy, low quality wire, misfit screws and wet underwear.

Fortunately it didn’t happen. Or not yet at any rate. But the crash has been something of a recurring nightmare here in the Minnesota satellite studios.

No, all activities took place in the usual fashion and Mr. Zhao might well have slept right through the usual 8 AM call from Minnesota, which started off something like this:

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YU: Wéi? Èi! Wǒ zuómo jiù gāi nǐ lái diànhuà le. [laughs]
为？ Èi! 我琢磨就该你来电话了！
Hello? Hi! I thought it should be you calling!

Zuómo de(?) nǐ tīngdedǒng ma?
琢磨的（？） 你听得懂吗？
Do you understand the word zuómo? [zuomo being the colloquial term she used above to say "thinking"]

“Zuómo” de, jiùshì wǒ xiǎngde. Zuómo jiùshì xiǎng de yìsi.
琢磨的就是“我想的”。 琢磨就是想的意思。
Zuómo is really “I think.” It really just means “think.”

Duì — kěshì zhèi liǎ zìr wǒ shuō bu xiàlái shì shénme!
对可是这俩字儿我说不下来是什么！  [thanks to André for 时/是 correction]
Right — but I don’t have any idea what the two characters would be! [ie the two characters of zuómo]

Proper Mandarin

The first of several oddities here is the question itself. Zuómo struck me as an awfully pedestrian word for YU to be asking about, given its frequent use around the studios, so why does she think it’s so unusual as to inquire about it specifically? Mrs. BJS says that she thinks of the word as being very local. So the YU logic is, apparently, that non-native speakers should naturally pick up only pǔtōnghuà [普通话 = standard Mandarin] rather than any local dialect, even if they are, in fact, enrolled in the school of local dialect. Do those of you outside Beijing hear this?

Talking about a word

The second oddity I haven’t quite gotten right — see the question marks in the transcription above. It’s the meta-language, i.e. the particles that are used after zuómo to indicate that she is talking about that word. In the first case it sounds a lot to me like zhe, but later like de. Not sure what to do with this.

The third tone

The third observation is not so much an oddity but a textbook example of the half third tone. I was recently pointed to a nicely done website that explains the half third tone along with other tone phenomena not only in clear and simple terms, but with examples AND sound files. Check out the site and the reference to half third tones specifically. To quote from there about the half third tone [the numbers just refer to the level of the pitch -- click through to the chart to see]:

in spontaneous speech, the third tone is rarely pronounced in full…instead… only the 2-1 part of the 2-1-4 full third tone contour is produced [before non-third tone syllables]

Now take a look at the pitch graphic (made in Praat — see the blue line? it’s a bit faint but you can click through for a larger graphic) for when YU says “kěshì zhèi liǎ zìr” (i.e. “but the two characters…”)

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Looks a lot like the third tone is simply a lingering at the bottom of the vocal range, just like the “2-1″ comment would indicate. [The bump at the end is probably just YU beginning to laugh]

John Pasden of Sinosplice had a great post recently on the problem of teaching Zhonglish speakers to use tones effectively in the context of normal speech. He summarizes a lecture he heard from a teacher of Mandarin as a second language:

We’re giving students of Chinese the wrong picture of tones (third tone in particular)

Tones are not of equal importance in natural speech

Funny-sounding speech can be corrected most efficiently by focusing on certain key tones

Then he expands on this to propose the following chart for discussion:

This contrasts nicely with the traditional picture of tones (also stolen from that post)

John claims not to know whether such a chart “could actually be useful to any students” (although that seems to be his implication). But now we have YU’s sentence, which provides evidence that the first chart would work pretty well, as long as you use it in combination with John’s other admonition, that “tones are not of equal importance in connected speech.”

Granting that it’s no small task to teach which syllables in a sentence are “important”, let’s assume for a moment that it was something like this:

kě [low]
shì [unimportant]
zhèi [falling, high to low]
liǎ [low]
zìr [falling, high to low]
wǒ [unimportant/low]

Thus: low low high-low low high-low low

It’s almost exactly what YU’s Praat chart looks like, above. None of this is to say that students should not be taught the full range of third tone possibilities. As a rule of thumb for connected speech, though, saying that the third tone is dipping/falling-rising isn’t very helpful. The operating Beijing Sounds hypothesis is that you would get far more mileage out of trying to remember two rules, that the third tone is:

1. Low (no falling or rising or anything– just at the bottom of your vocal range)
2. UNLESS it precedes another third tone, in which case it becomes the second tone

Simplified? Sure. Oversimplified? Hmmm

Hànzì thought control

The final oddity is YU’s unprompted reference to not knowing the characters for zuómo. If you have even the slightest belief in Freudian slips, you’d have to believe that anxiety about knowing the characters for a given word is not far from the surface of her consciousness.

“Wait a second,” I can hear someone say, “maybe it just popped into her head because you, syz, are always asking to write down the characters associated with words.”

Trust me on this one: almost never.

In this case I have to conjecture that it really is her fervent belief that she should know the characters for any word (not to mention the belief that there are characters for every word) and that her observation and laughter indicate feeling kind of foolish about not knowing.

“But wait another second,” you’re saying. “Aren’t you guilty of simply exoticizing the language experience here? After all, you might find the same kind of attitude in a native English speaker who didn’t know how to spell, say, broccoli.”

True enough. But it seems unlikely that the native English speaker would be obsessive enough about the writing system to voice a concern about spelling in the same breath that they’re teaching somebody a new word. This is just the hànzì (汉字 = Chinese character) thought police controlling the use of spoken language!

Or maybe not. Is it just the same attitude as the one in the old saw that “ain’t’s not a word because it ain’t in the dictionary”?

Ah, the diffidence of it all.

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*Not intended as any cultural observation — it’s probably not normal in other Chinese families either, but I have no experience with that.