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Soundbites: November(rrr)

As someone once said about music: do it once and it’s a mistake; do it twice and it’s a theme. For last week’s taxi driver, who hails from near the airport (NW [oops] NE outer suburbs), it’s shíyī yuèr (十一月儿 = November with plenty of R), twice baked.

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SJ: Wàiguórén lái Běijīng bù shǎo, kàn Běijīng, Tiān’ānmén. Nǐ kàn zhèige shénmede: shíyìyuèr shíbā hào. Zài nǐmen guójiā de nèige Àobāmǎ bùshì yào fǎngwèn Zhōngguó le ma?
外国人来北京不少，看北京，天安门。你看这个什么的：十一月儿十八号，在你们国家的那个奥巴马不是要访问中国了吗？
Quite a few foreigners come to Beijing, to see Beijing, Tiananmen. Y’know, November(rrr) 18th, that Obama, from your country, is going to visit China?

SYZ: A duì duì. Shénme shíhòu?
啊对对。什么时候？
Oh, right, right. When?

SJ: Shíbā hào ba
十八号吧
The 18th, I think.

SYZ: Zhèige shíyuè?
这个十月？
This October?

SJ: Shíyī yuèr
十一月儿
November(rrr)

SYZ: A shíyī yuè
啊十一月。
Oh, November.

Comments 5

  1. chriswaugh_bj wrote:

    “near the airport (NW outer suburbs)”

    Like the Xijiao Airport just south of the Summer Palace in Haidian?

    Posted 15 Oct 2009 at 6:28 pm
  2. Randy Alexander wrote:

    Wow. That’s a first for me (hearing erhua on 月).

    Posted 15 Oct 2009 at 8:31 pm
  3. Zev Handel wrote:

    I know this is unrelated to the point of your post, but it’s interesting to me how transliteration practices based on non-Mandarin dialects continue to persist over decades, even centuries. Mandarin has syllables pronounced “ou” (like 甌) that would seem to be more suitable for rendering the first syllable of Obama’s name. But back when Cantonese was the medium for choosing characters to represent foreign words, the character 奧 was chosen to render foreign “o” (as in Àolínpǐkè 奧林匹克 “Olympics”). This character is pronounced ào in Mandarin but ou in Cantonese. And now that the precedent has been established, the transliteration of English “o” into Chinese ào is more or less automatic, even though you would think that similarity of Mandarin pronunciation to the English would have become the paramount criterion for such things by now.

    Posted 16 Oct 2009 at 8:24 am
  4. syz wrote:

    @chriswaugh: ha, thanks. I’ve made the correction above.

    @Zev, yeah, way off topic but add it to the list of stuff that should be put into a big Cantonese series — lots of interesting pronunciations come from there, I’m told

    @Randy, now I feel more legit about being blown away too, since I guess your comment implies you haven’t heard it from dongbei. That was really a wtf kind of erhuayin to my ear, but since he repeated it, I’ll bet he’s not alone

    Posted 24 Oct 2009 at 7:00 pm
  5. syz wrote:

    Zev, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this Danwei article you’ve probably already seen, but for the record — it’s all about transliteration of Obama and the choices that are made in transliteration generally.

    Posted 13 Nov 2009 at 9:12 pm