i posted a picture earlier of a phrase in changzhou hua as viewed through praat, a program that will show you tone contours in speech layered on top of a spectrograph. i had a chance to get a recording of stops (her name) today while in a quiet room, so i asked her to give some simple sentences that would have easy mandarin equivalents. i wanted something simpler than [ŋəu fə̆ ɕi̯ɑʊ̯ z̥ɛˑ], “i don’t know”, so that i could try to see how tones were actually applied. i know there are seven tones and that the tone sandhi is a bit to learn, but i’ve not actually seen or heard anything that would tell me what words take which tones.

below is an image, taken from pratt, of her saying “我住在常州” on the left. the right is “我讲常州话”. “我住在常州” ends up as [ŋəu zu lai sɑŋ z̥ei] (more or less) with 住 and 在 lumped together in the second pulse. you can see a small dip between the two words before the falling tone of 常. the second part, “我讲常州话” comes out as [ŋəu gɑŋ sɑŋ z̥ei wʊ], however, being a girl around 23 years old, she adds an 啊 to the end. that shows up as the hook and dark spot at the end of the string.



you can see it’s much clearer than the first one, which was done under much noisier conditions. i’m not expecting gold for when i try to record extended family this next week, but perhaps it’ll at least let me have something to tune my ears to.

my hope is to get some sense of just which words would take the different tones. having a chart is nice, but not actually at all useful. i’ll post what i figure out.

it has also occurred to me that wuxi may have the same tone patterns assigned to the same words, so i’m expanding my search of books. i trip to xinhua left me empty handed, so tomorrow i’m hitting up the local specialty bookshop. yuen ren chao is from this town afterall, so i’d be surprised if i can’t find his works. it might just mean i have to make a trip to the library with my digital camera.

update: sounds
just testing this out at the moment. hosted at archive.org using their flash player.
我不知道 [ŋəu fə̆ ɕi̯ɑʊ̯ z̥ɛˑ]