[Part 2 of Tourism, the series. Part 1 here]
Since it was a bit of a bah humbug attitude that launched the tourism series…
About Tourism, the series
Engraved into a sizable hunk of Labrador granite, on a pedestal in the executive anteroom at the Beijing Sounds Studios:
Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.
It’s not a promising mindset with which to start the summer travel season. Yet that’s exactly what July and August 2009 brought to the Beijing Studios staff: tourism of the first degree…
- in Shanghai and Nanjing: a tagalong (follow-the-spouse type) business trip with a steady diet of meandering street-walking and cold-hotel-pool swimming
- in Xi’an and surrounding Shaanxi province, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall: excursions with Grandfather and Grandmother Beijing Sounds visiting China for the first time
This series, then, takes the optimistic and contrarian view that there might, in fact — counter to all past experience, deeply-held biases, and scientifically-derived hypotheses — be some reason to haul the microphone outside the boundaries of this fine capital city and open up one’s ears to the sounds beyond.
You’ve heard the stories about Nanjing / Lanjing. Even as you step off the bus, you’ve got the recorder running in anticipation. Maybe, just maybe, you can make up for all the “it’s really an L” indignity that you put up with from readers the first time around.
But to your great disappointment, the cab driver from the bus station plays it utterly straight, Ns and Ls as distinct as the sauna air that greets your emergence from the refrigerated taxicab. Ah, well. Up to the room to recharge the batteries in anticipation of a long recording session tomorrow.
The elevator ride is a classic: floor by floor of stops and bungling of baggage by guest and bellhop alike. But hey — huh? — wait a sec! Suddenly you pull out of your funk with a double take — could it be? You get off at your floor, but immediately call the elevator to go down again. Mrs. BJS heads on to the room, out of patience with fine-grained distinctions of the organs of language production. But PBS sticks along for the ride, and is rewarded with:
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Elevator Announcement: Going down. Xià. [beeping]
EA: Ninth floor. Jiǔ Nóu [楼 = lóu in standard Mandarin]
PBS: Jiǔ nóu — jiǔ lóu [giggling]
There it is. The ninth nevel of heaven in a microcosm of L=N phoneme conflation. Tourism justified — for another day anyway.
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Comments 6
while i know it wasn’t your purpose for coming down this way, it’s nice to see im not the only one who can justify tedious travel with a 15 second sound byte.
the other good one in town is the hunan lu as “funan lu” drivers, the f being a voiceless bilabial fricative, not a labiodental. my first day in nanjing that one came up and i was sure he had misheard me or more likely i had mis-spoken the street name. turns out it was neither.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 11:35 am ¶Used to see a guy from Sichuan who did the L-N mixup. Adorable.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 11:38 am ¶I heard something between an L and an N. But I see your point.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 1:29 pm ¶@Kellen — it was definitely worth it. PBS and I bust that one out occasionally even now, a month and a half after the elevator. Not that we’re laughing AT anyone here, mind you — it’s all for the sake of better Zhonglish-Chinglish analysis!
@Karan — good point. I agree that it’s more in the middle of Mandarin L and N than strictly one or the other. And it’s not quite accurate to claim that speakers “mix up N and L” since, in their dialect, there is NO N and L, there’s only one sound: L/N. It’s me the listener, in fact, who mixes up N and L by trying to think of them as two different sounds in the first place! Kinda like the parallel that I think Kellen brought up before: Nanjing’s L/N is to Mandarin L and N as America’s /sh/ is to Mandarin’s /sh/ and /x/. It’s just not the same — somewhere in the middle.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 1:59 pm ¶There’s a great anecdote in the comments of a recent Sinosplice post where John B heard someone distinguish between a bathroom for 绿人 and 蓝人. Priceless.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 2:21 pm ¶I used to have a chinese teacher that pronounced 能 as “Leng” and so on. I was thinking she had speech impairment…
Posted 31 Mar 2011 at 2:12 pm ¶