Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On maintaining political correctness when other people’s languages still sound funny

New Mexico, USA — Christmas, 1978. In the wrapping paper-strewn living room of grandma’s house, after the midday dinner, the adults are engaged in the safe banter of nostalgia, the children, including nine-year-old syz, engrossed in the newly acquired toys, tools and trinkets.

There is no drinking going on in this household of traditional Methodists, but when the kids start to get bored with their loot, and someone requests Uncle John’s Chinese jingle bells, he’s only too happy to oblige with something that might otherwise be associated with inebriation and sounds kind of like this…

Ding dong ching
Long bong ming
Doo shee poh wah ting!

… in a sing-songy sort of nasal head voice. You get the idea.

The children rolled on the floor. The adults guffawed. Christmas was complete.

Beijing Sounds considered trying to interview Uncle John for this piece to obtain an actual recording and to find out if it really was Chinese jingle bells… or was it Japanese jingle bells? It could well have been both for all it mattered in that context. But added to the technical challenge (of trying to figure out what his phone number is) there was the cultural challenge as well: it’s a different era now. Although there is no doubt that variations of that Chinese Jingle Bells will still be videotaped this Christmas at family gatherings somewhere in the States, they will be fewer and more frowned upon than they would have been 30 years ago. In fact, you’re probably a lot more likely these days to hear jingle bells in real Mandarin, or Hakka, even in the US.

Modern American sensitivities prohibit such stark display of other cultures as Other, at least if you’ve been through the polite society indoctrination ceremonies known as “college”. A subclause of that prohibition has also eliminated the practice of completely (or almost completely) faked foreign languages in the movies. In 1958, for example, you could get away with a singsong Something Resembling Mandarin in a mainstream Hollywood release. In this scene from the Inn of the Sixth Happiness (from a clip on YouTube starting at about 1:30) there’s an encounter between the heroine, an English missionary played by Ingrid Bergman, and the leader of the local village, the “Mandarin”. He is trying to get her to take the job of his foot binding inspector. As Bergman enters the room, the camera is focused on her and the Mandarin’s Mandarin is quite native, albeit unnaturally slow:

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Mandarin: Bùzhǔn bǎ nǚháizi de jiǎo chánxiǎo le. Sānshí yīxià de nǚrén chánjiǎo de bǎ jiǎo fàng le
不准把女孩子的脚缠小了。 三十以下的女人缠脚的把脚放了
It is forbidden to bind girls’ feet. You must unbind the feet of all females under 30 who have bound feet.

Assistant: Mandarin say: Captain Lin ask him to help you. So he offer you a job on his staff, foot inspector.

Bergman: Foot inspector?!

[giggles from watching courtesans]

Mandarin: Zǒukāi!
走开！
Go away!

But when Bergman puts in her job requests and the camera turns to the Mandarin’s face, the cat grabs his Zhonglish tongue — and the assistant’s!

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Mandarin: Zhè shì shénme?
这是什么？
What is this?

Assistant: Xiānsheng, gūniang shuō tā dào xiāngxia qù de shíhòu tā yě yào chuánjiào.
?? Gūniang shuō tā dào xiāngxia qù de shíhòu tā yě ??? ??
？？姑娘说她到乡下的时候她也？？？
先生姑娘说她到乡下的时候她也要传教 [Thanks, Dim Summary, for the correction]
Sir, the girl says when she goes to the countryside she also wants to preach/proselytize

Mandarin: Wǒ dāying. Zhè cì wǒ yuánliàng tā. Tā zhè nǚrén yǒu píqi kěshì dǎndà hǎo.
我答应。 这次我原谅她。 她这女人有脾气可是胆大好
I will answer. This time I will pardon her. This woman, she has a temper, but it’s good to be audacious.

Assistant: Mandarin agree to what you ask and forgive you for the way you speak to him, this time. In a world full of frightened people, he likes courage wherever he find it, even in a rude and angry woman.

Hmm, a bit of commentary in the assistant’s translation at the end there.

You might guess that (surprisingly maybe, for the era) they got a Mandarin-speaking voice actor to put in the audio when the camera was facing elsewhere, but felt that they could get away with some singsong straight out of the mouth of the (non-Mandarin-speaking) Mandarin when the camera needed to go back to him. And they were probably right: very few in the 1958 audience would have been expected to know enough of the language to be irritated.

But to describe the second dialog as Mandarin is to call ketchup a vegetable, or Titanic a love story. There may be some statutory truth to it, but the categories need an extreme makeover.

The language is a far howl from Dances with Wolves, for example, which famously pulled together a critical mass of Lakota (Sioux) speakers with the help of Doris Leader Charge. Or compare also the soon-to-be-released Gran Torino from Clint Eastwood that has popped up in recent Minnesota news. It pulls heavily from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Hmong community for authentic dialog in Hmong/Hmoob [Note 3], which in Mandarin is Miáo (苗) and is closely related to the Yáo languages found in southern China as well (12 distinct tones, anyone?).

Maybe you could argue that the need for authenticity is also driven by the speed of modern communications. After all, it didn’t take much more than an internet second before Max Planck discovered that the aesthetically pleasing sample of classical Chinese selected for the cover of their most recent selection of Serious Topics was actually a bawdy snippet of burlesque.

But Does the Onion Fake It?
Whatever the cause, the unacceptability of language-faking in polite society is so pervasive as to require even The Onion — whose mission is to shock and awe the polite classes — to broadcast its Mandarin-language spoof in Mandarin. Sound interesting? Go ahead, take a look (hat tip to Chinese Law Prof Blog):

China’s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About How Great The Chinese Government Is

[Video clip at The Onion, or here's the sound if the video isn't working:

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]

So you listen a bit. “Yeah, pretty sure the woman who plays the news anchor is Taiwanese” [any Taiwanese agree?].

And then you move on to the main guy — and do a doubletake, “Hey, wait a second — what the? Sure, it’s Mandarin. Yeah, I can understand it, sorta… maybe from somewhere down south? Hong Kong?”

You listen again. And again. And again. Eventually, you can’t hold it in any longer, you’ve got to pull out the recorder and dissect the thing down to the varicose veins so that there can be no doubt that it is, indeed, Zhonglish! Yes, to quote again from the meticulously researched Urban Dictionary:

Zhonglish
(n) The mangled, garbled, butchered, malapropriated or trashed Chinese spoken by native speakers of English.

Pronunciation notes: Similar to Joan-glish. The ZH is NOT pronounced like the S in “fusion” but like the DGE in fudge.

Origin: “zhong” is taken directly from the first syllable of the Mandarin word for Chinese; “lish” is from English, of course.

Don’t forget before you start down this path, though, the statement from the first article in the Zhonglish series that has essentially become a cardinal rule. Namely, that Zhonglish analysis should include…

…some reasonably constructive analysis of the “All right, I know I sound like a foreigner speaking Mandarin, but why?” problem.

No poking fun; we’re all in this together.

There’s a new twist for this analysis, however: the question of whether, in the first place, he really does sound like a foreigner. The native speakers queried seem fairly, but not entirely, confident that he is. On the other hand they weren’t certain enough to rule out the possibility that he knows some other flavor of Chinese language as a mother tongue — which of course would make him less “foreign” in some sense.

Here’s the evidence.

Tones

Ah, tones in combination. As discussed in past posts, they’re cake for native speakers, so natural as to be beyond the reach, often, of the native speaker’s explicit knowledge. But they’re a constant struggle for Zhonglish speakers. CAR (China’s Andy Rooney, just to give him a moniker) actually does quite well with a lot of them. Listen to the beginning of these two clips:

1.

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Hěn duō rén bǎ wǒmen…
很多人把我们。。。

2.

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Suǒyǐ nǐmen…
所以你们。。。

Oh! Mandarin, how might I botch thee? Let me count the ways. Mr. CAR might, for example, have made the hěn in (1) into a full falling-rising instead of the half third tone that it’s supposed to be. (See this site for good explication or this recent post for more discussion.) But as it is, the Praat [Note 1] verdict is:

Nicely done, as indicated by the blue pitch line.

1. low (half third)
2. high (first)
3. rising (second)

[click the pic for a larger version]

There are even more botching opportunities in (2). Suǒyǐ requires a LOW (i.e. half third) tone on yǐ before all syllables except another third tone, and being quite common, it would tend to be ingrained as “low” in the Zhonglish speaker’s head. But if CAR had kept it low, he’d have missed the tone sandhi between yǐ and nǐ that turns the yǐ into yí and forces it to the high end of the vocal range. Ditto on the sandhi for “bǎ wǒ…” in (1). Both are very well executed.

Some other instances, however, come across as tones that a native speaker would not hit, e.g.

1.

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bīngxiāng méi máobing [pronounced sort of like māobīng]…
冰箱没毛病

2.

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yǒuxiē rén [sounds like yǒuxiē rēn]…
有些人

In the first case, the máo of máobing ends up purely at the top of the vocal range, like a Tone 1, rather than moving from the middle to the top as it would with a native speaker [Note 2]. In the second, it’s the same type of problem: rén is a second tone after the previous syllable has left CAR at the top of his vocal range. Instead of coming back down to the middle and going up, though, he just stays up there and it ends up sounding like a Tone 1.

To be utterly explicit, the argument is that native speakers would not make this kind of tonal error. It’s not to say that native speakers never say one tone when they mean another — this post from Randy on sister blog Echoes of Manchu has an example of a native speaker tone misunderstanding, regarding the tones in the name of a city, that almost led to his party taking the train the wrong direction — it’s that the tone sandhi are as unconscious to a native Mandarin speaker as the choice of a/an is to a native English speaker.

Other

There’s a lot of other stuff going on in the recording, but I can’t do any better than a miscellaneous category if this post is ever going to finish. Take jiǎrú (假如) for example. CAR sounds pretty far off in these two that are almost in a row…

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I’m tempted to say that it’s more than just the fact that the tone is wrong, jiǎrù, and that there are also problems with the initial j. But the slicing and dicing in my sound program can’t convince me beyond a reasonable doubt.

There are also places where the sound is just garbled, almost like it’s been put through an electronic wringer similar to what Beijing Sounds put Obama through] to get him to speak Mandarin. Not that bad, of course, but listen to this:

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Wǒ yǐqián de péngyou
我以前的朋友
My former friend…

Not quite sure. In the video, the camera switches from CAR’s face over to a picture of his friend right before he speaks this line. They might have messed with the sound, but maybe the answer to this lies in prosody and tones as well, an area where again I must proclaim my vast ignorance (Note 2). Still, I’ll offer the working hypothesis that the phrase sounds wrong because it would require emphasis something like this: Wǒ yǐqián de péngyou — to which CAR is nowhere close.

The bottom line

CAR is not a fake. He’s clearly been speaking Mandarin for a long time and pretty darn well. To satisfy any questions about that issue, you only need to listen again to that second clip from Inn of the Sixth Happiness. No comparison. Mandarin is really, really hard to fake, unless perhaps if you’re singing a song, and even then you’d better keep it short and sweet.

Is he a native speaker? Is it Zhonglish? I think the evidence is pretty solid on the side of the latter, but I wouldn’t take it to court. Either way it says something about globalization that The Onion would go to the trouble of creating something in Mandarin that is intended to be laughed at by a non-Mandarin speaking audience (the Beijing Sounds native Mandarin-speaking consultants who watched the piece were mostly just bemused). But I have to guess that, in the end, most of the people watching it will get about the same value out of CAR’s Mandarin as the kids got out of Uncle John’s Chinese jingle bells.

—————-

Note 1: See Sinosplice for a mini-tutorial on Praat

Note 2: If I knew more about the phonetics of tones, I’d also venture to add that a native speaker could probably get away with not much tone at all on the méi, because it is a less important word in the overall prosody of the phrase — but I really don’t know anything about this and I’m going off of pure no native speaker intuition. Any linguistics types able to enlighten us on the prosodic situation here?

Note 3: For kicks, see this Language Log article for a discussion of the how that B got into “Hmoob” and you’ll take a weird wormhole all the way back to frequent BJS authority YR Chao