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Monthly Archives June 2009

Nigel Greenwood 1945 – 2009

I’m sad to report that a friend to Chinese passed away earlier this month (h/t pinyin.info for passing along the news — more information available at John Wells’s phonetic blog).
I did not know Nigel well enough to write anything approaching a comprehensive obituary, or even a comprehensive view of his work within Chinese, but between [...]

Posted 22 June 2009 † syz § Nigel Greenwood ‡ Comments (5) °

Sunday morning schwa

First it was  [ʋ] now it’s [ə]. Probably YR Chao has something to say about this, but any such reference is yet unknown in the Beijing Sounds studios, primarily because the phenomenon just hit the radar this morning. To be specific, what, exactly is going on with plain old hēi (黑=black) here?!

Posted 14 June 2009 † syz § unMandarin Mandarin sounds ‡ Comments (10) °

What happened to the BJS homepage sidebar?

[Update: Problem is fixed, but without much knowledge of why. Technical team fired en masse. Details at bottom if you're a glutton for this kind of thing.]

Posted 11 June 2009 † syz § meta ‡ Comments (6) °

Sound off: EXMARaLDA

On the beauty of EXMARaLDA for “computer assisted transcription and annotation of spoken language”
[Warning: path ahead slippery with geek guano]
Let’s say you were thinking about putting your piddly little Mandarin transcripts and sound files into some more accessible format. Gosh, wouldn’t it be cool if you could milk the data a bit, since you [...]

Posted 09 June 2009 † syz § EXMARaLDA transcriptions ‡ Comments (8) °

Silkworm husbandry

On conversation topic universals

Spend too long with Beijing cabbies and you might think they were all…

Posted 08 June 2009 † syz § EXMARaLDA transcriptions § běijīnghuà § taxi ‡ Comments (10) °