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?!
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hēi bái hēi hēi hēi [həei?!]
黑白黑黑黑
black white black black black
Sorry you gotta listen to this one pretty closely, but the last hēi captures the [həei] pretty well. It was even clearer before the recording equipment went live, naturally. But an afternoon attempt to gather better data not only yielded a nearly* schwa-free utterance:
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… it also elicited vehement denials that a schwa could ever reside in such a place. So the exercise of determining whether the studios have, as alleged in the past, lost their phonological marbles is left to the wisdom of the pit.
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*Although after listening for a bit too long, is it possible that you can hear a schwa trying to sneak out in the middle?
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Comments 10
Schwa…I am slightly confused. The vowel in 黑 doesn’t sound unstressed to me, but I can definitely here some “spitting” noise like that common of hebrew from which the term schwa originates (is this what you are referring to). The spitting noise is something only found in the north I think, especially when people are mad and saying 恨你.
Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 6:49 pm ¶I recall finding an early work by YR Chao from the late 30’s here in his ancestral hometown library marking the significance of watermelon as a schwa inducing fruit. It might be available on Google books if you search hard enough.
Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 7:34 pm ¶@Black: clearly the first quarter is going against me, but I’m looking for the comeback. “Spitting noise” — ha, but I get it.
@Kellen, I just spent the last hour googling to no avail, only to have the brainstorm that I could check the index of Chao’s grammar book itself. Sure enough: watermelon, pages 47 and 163. Alas, the first reference is to aspirated consonants made only while expectorating seeds (ie not including loogies/greenies), and the second is just standard stuff about the grammar around eating “down into” the rind of the melon so as not to waste any of it. Let me know if you find anything else, though.
Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 8:50 pm ¶I’m not too partial to watermelon but I have heard the [həei] phenomenon here. I think it has to do with the way people learn pinyin and as such conceptualize it. The word “pinyin” itself just means putting sounds together. The sound “h” in pinyin is realized as [χɤ], so I believe the schwa in 黑 is left over from that. If you ask a native Mandarin speaker to separate the sounds in “hei”, they will most likely say [χɤ] [ei] [χei]. If you ask immediately afterwards ask them to say “hei” slowly, they just might turn the [ɤ] into a schwa (it would be over the top to say [χɤei]).
I doubt PBS would come up with this so readily though — even her “hei” lacks [χ], and she seems to basically replace it with [h]. I would try someone who hasn’t been influenced by English.
Posted 14 Jun 2009 at 9:19 pm ¶i’m afraid you’re hunting a ghost here. for one thing, your subject may be not, as mentioned above, ‘100% native’ (you are aware that there was a sweeping wave among field linguists a hundred years ago to specifically search out those elderly people from the most rural regions as were the least ‘infected’ with modern education—a view that has been much criticized, but may contain a pointer here). i have to second that the speaker, while starting out with a more typical [χ] initial consonant, then slips into [h] as she goes on, and maintains this even when lowering her speed and producing slow, recitative speach. if this is not typical of peking people, then anything she says may likewise not be fully typical. number two, i do have difficulties hearing the alleged shwa. i observe that, in my speech (largely acquired in taipei, taiwan), when i do say [χɤei] or [χəei], it sounds a lot like [χʷei] 灰. in other words, in my speech, i can make a difference between ‘black’ and ‘grey’ all without moving my lips. if that is not a wrong impression, it would strongly suggest that native speakers are wary of epenthetic shwas in words like these.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 7:21 pm ¶I think Randy’s got the right explanation.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 7:29 pm ¶@randy—what you point out sounds similar to the kind of exaggerated enunciation one sometimes gets to hear in singing and on the stage. in german, as an example, you get a very nice dramatic effect when sounding ’schmerz’ (pain) as ‘ha-scha-me-retz’ [haʃamɛrɛts] and then slowly turning tha [a]s into schwas and almost eliding them. however, if youre theory is true, then one should expect similar effects with other syllables, say ding, or hao. so has anyone ever observed an exaggerated [dəiŋ χəɑʊ] “得英禾凹” (here written minus tones) for 頂好? does something like that ever occur?
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 7:53 pm ¶First, the personal: Hi Chriswaugh long time no see, and welcome back too ^love*/jizura.com who I haven’t seen for a very long time! I had to search way back in the comments to find the last visit under a slightly different moniker.
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So Randy/chriswaugh and ^love*, is it fair to summarize thus…?
This is a delightful controversy (insofar as anything on BJS is controversial) because it may actually be testable. As ^love* points out, we could support Randy’s theory by finding Pinyin-predicted sound insertions with different initials and finals. I’d add that we could
Sound right? I’ll keep my ear out for this. Here are a couple of thoughts:
A. I seem to remember there are Mandarin dialects that have trouble distinguishing hēi/huī (黑、灰), often to humorous effect. Can’t remember where I saw it though. Might be interesting.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 2:14 pm ¶B. I’m still fairly convinced that the schwa I heard from PBS initially was not English influenced. I agree that the second clip starts to sound very [h] like. That’s probably my fault for even asking. Anytime she’s speaking Mandarin to me, especially when I’m asking her to repeat something or teach me something, the potential for her to do something non-native is very high — she seems to delight in giving me conflicting information in the same way that she is comfortable repeating back her English teacher’s Chinglish with precisely mimicked pronunciation. But the earlier utterances, including both the one recorded above and the first big cool schwa one that got away, were all in the context of her talking to her mother in Mandarin about some math problems and I don’t have much doubt that they were pure native Beijinger.
No, I was reading Randy as commenting on the way kids are taught to “spell” out syllables. They don’t do it letter-by-letter, but initial+final. What I heard in the phantom schwa was “h-, -ei, hei” like in a primary school writing class.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 6:43 pm ¶Very difficult to master this beautiful, nuanced language.
Having the pronunciation sounded out helps greatly, thank you.
Posted 19 Jun 2009 at 3:31 pm ¶