On a vowel that nobody ever asked Vanna for
The aforementioned closing of the BJS Minnesota office has interfered with production rates recently, but sometimes you get a clip that just has to be rushed through.
After the Zev Handel smackdown of BJS analysis a few months ago (in a post about Avril Lavigne’s Zhonglish, see comment #3), I started thinking about how vowel quality sometimes makes all the difference between Zhonglish and Mandarin. In that case Zev was talking about how hard native English speakers find the
high front rounded vowel in Mandarin (pinyin ü, IPA [y])
Absolutely true. The ü gives me no end of trouble. But today we’ve got a seemingly much easier one: the /u/ in /tu/ of Tuesday (pronounced in AmE) vs. the /tu/ of tǔdòu (土豆 = potato or web video site).
The two u’s* are awfully close in some ways. But what struck me as I was editing this clip for the family blog was how utterly distinct they are when you put them right next to each other. Here’s PBS singing her version of the Today is Monday song.
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Here’s just the tuesday-tudour part:
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And here are the lyrics, in case you just had to have the context:
Today is ___…
Monday moon cake
Tuesday tǔdòur [土豆儿 = "potatoes"]
Wednesday water
Thursday thick meat
Friday fried beans
Saturday spaghetti
Sunday soup
Am I flouting Section 2 of the Constitution if I ask the true phonetics folks how best one would describe that difference?
PS: if you can’t get enough of the difference, I actually clipped out all six instances from the song. Remarkably consistent, but pretty abrasive to listen to. Don’t say you weren’t warned:
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* If you’ve always been frightened of getting called out on the greengrocer’s apostrophe error, take comfort in this Language Log post.
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Comments 8
The Mandarin /u/ is much closer to the cardinal [u] vowel – it is very high, very back, and very rounded. The American English vowel is less high, less back, and less rounded — closer to IPA [ʉ]. And if you are a Southern California surfer dude, it goes even fronter than that, [dyd]!
(P.S. “Smackdown”?)
Posted 09 Mar 2009 at 12:36 pm ¶she’s rounding in tudou significantly whereas the sound in tuesday sounds more /tju…/ to me and with less pronounced rounding. think i’m gonna agree with zev on the [ʉ] thing though.
we don’t say potato like that down here in the south. way less rounded, not to mention the erhuayin. before i listened to the recording i wasn’t sure what the issue was.
Posted 09 Mar 2009 at 5:15 pm ¶Is that ‘Monday’ not decidedly British? And as Kellen points out, one or two or the ‘Tuesdays’ are going that way too. Jolly good show, PBS!
The /u/ sounds seem to me much more about the lips than anything else. The lips really push forward in a George Bush way for the English sound. For the Chinese /u/ they seem to be much tighter, almost like a /w/, and really don’t press forward much at all.
Posted 09 Mar 2009 at 7:18 pm ¶As someone who spends lots of time teaching kids how to pronounce the American /u/ sound, I’ve thought about this difference quite a lot. As Zev says, the Chinese /u/ sound is just basically [u], as in 乌鸦 (wūyā, crow); it’s very pure.
The American sound (which I don’t think is significantly different from the British sound) is really a glide. It starts near the schwa (just north of it usually, but it’s quite variable), often between [ɘ] and [ɨ], and then glides to [u]. When it’s exaggerated, it can start at [ɪ], as in the expression of disgust, “eew”.
The next step is to look at the formant makeup of the onset of /u/ in Praat.
Posted 10 Mar 2009 at 2:03 pm ¶@Sima: I didn’t hear anything British about “Monday” or any other word. As far as I understand, the basic difference between AmE and BrE in the pronunciation of “Monday” is the end: AmE /ei/, BrE /i/. PBS’s /ei/ is pretty clear. Being an unaccented syllable, it gets reduced, but the reduction favors the nucleus, which is [e], and not [i].
As far as the rounding of English /u/, it starts basically unrounded, and glides back to [u]. Some people write this as [uw] in the States.
Posted 10 Mar 2009 at 2:09 pm ¶Randy is correct that the American English /u/ is a glide that starts central and moves back toward [u]. This is most obvious in open syllables. But it seems to me that when followed by a dental consonant (t, d, s, n), the vowel doesn’t make it nearly as far back toward the target [u] before the tongue needs to move forward again to articulate the consonant. In such a case the vowel becomes more like a centralized monophthong. (This is all based on introspection, I haven’t plotted any vowel formants or anything.) And I presume that the vowel will be even fronter when it occurs between two dentals, which is why “dude” is a syllable that will bring the vowel closest to [y].
Posted 15 Mar 2009 at 11:17 am ¶Apparently Sima is losing his ear for his native language!
Actually it seems like Zev’s last comment best explains why it’s hard (for Sima) to hear the difference between the AmE and BrE Tuesday — pretty damn subtle.
Kellen: extra link love in exchange for a tudou recording from Wu-land!
PS: Zev, the BJS marketing guy made me put in the “smackdown” business. Some comment about how he wanted to see posts with more controversy…
Posted 19 Mar 2009 at 8:48 am ¶There’s definitely a difference. I agree in principle with Sima — it’s got something to do with the lips. I can feel a little puff of air on my lips with the Chinese vowel.
Posted 20 Mar 2009 at 12:41 am ¶