…and not a footballer in sight.
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This is one of three recordings I got in the 10 minutes I had to wait to add money to my transit card as I was on my way to Jing’an this morning. The shrill voice is that of one trapped behind glass while the other belongs to a woman buying a plethora of transit cards.
First the vocabulary:
红 ɦoŋ / hong
黄 uã / whang
一百 iɪʔ pɑʔ / yik bak
两百 liã pɑʔ / liang bak
Tones are being ignored because of sandhi. I wouldn’t be able to give you standard numbers, and I’m not going to figure out what they should be after the sandhi is applied, because well, that would take forever.
You’ll hear her quietly say “一起七” around 0:22, 七 sounding a bit like 切. Basically, she came with 700RMB and wanted to get a bunch of red (actually rather dark pink) cards and one yellow card, the yellow card having only 100RMB on it.
In case you’re dying to know, here are some more colours in case you yourself would like colour-coded transit cards..
白 baʔ / bhak
黑 həʔ / hak
绿 lɔʔ / lok
青 ʨʰin / qin
蓝 lɛ / le
edit: Janky pseudo-pinyin just added. remember the bh marks a voiced b as in English (not to be confused with Mandarin’s unvoiced b) and a k at the end marks a glottal stop, i.e. like holding your breath a slight bit at the end of the syllable. And “whang” isn’t at all what you’d think it’d be. more like “wa” with a nasal [a], no real “ng” or “h” to speak of.
I’m embarrassed to say that after nearly four years in Shanghai I still can’t understand Shanghainese well enough to even muddle by
What do you use to get your recordings?
Most are just on my phone, an HTC touch. I’ve rewired the headphones so that there’s a microphone in the earpiece so that I can record things closer to mouth level without holding my phone up in the air. The microphone I used was from an external iSight and is significantly better than the original HTC mic. This, however, was done on the original built-in mic.
Hmm… I really wouldn’t use “bh” for a voiced b. “h” generally indicates aspiration. What I would recommend is:
p – unaspirated p (Mandarin b)
ph – aspirated p (Mandarin p)
b – unaspirated, voiced p (English b)
Same for k:
k – unaspirated k (Mandarin g)
kh – aspirated k (Mandarin k)
g – unaspirated, voice k (English g)
Yeah it’s not my pinyin. It’s from a publisher out of Shanghai. I also would use h for aspiration, but then I’d just use IPA if it were just me.
There’s another way to transliterate used by the Wu Association page, found here for Shanghai hua.
Alternatively there’s the long-short method.
I’m half tempted to just make my own transliteration system, but then I don’t really like the lack of a standard, thus the IPA fetish.
The one on the Wu Association page looks good, except I don’t know exactly how to pronounce the “gh”. It’s not an aspirated g, is it? I know Hindi has those. Also, for the vowels, I advocate sticking to Hanyu Pinyin as closely as possible. For the consonants, one has no choice because Mandarin simply lacks a bunch of them.
I don’t like the feel of the long-short romanization. Much harder to read.
Long-short sucks to read, I agree.
the gh in Arabic is a gargling sound so that’s my first instinct, but based on 红 being “ghon” I’m guessing gh = ɦ, the slightly raspy h in 河 when said by hardened migrant worker guys. Less severe than the Semitic version of the throaty sound.
OK, 曉得了。我以前學過一點阿拉伯語。
不錯。
它不是 خ，是 ح 差不多。
『ح』? 那我又糊塗了。發音『gh』的是『خ』（「ghain」），『ح』則是接近「a’in」的，不是嗎？
『خ』不是「ghain」。「ghain」是『 غ』和「a’in」是『ع』。都看起来像一個3。那是 [ɣ] 和 [ʕ] 但『خ』是 [x]。他们写 “gh” 读 [ɦ] 音。是安静的 [x]。
真對不起哦，我該去住神經病院！不知道怎麼讀錯了那兩個最基本的字。我又明白了，呵呵，『ح』是對的，都怪字體太小。
這是一個普遍的問題。阿拉伯字體常常太小。