Chinese Language

hippietrail

6:10 AM

ㄋㄧˇ　ㄏㄠˇ

@amateur: are you here?

你在这里？

amateur

6:28 AM

yes, hi

sorry, was afk

did you know there was a chat feature?!

what an excellent website

hippietrail

yes i've used it a lot on travel.se

amateur

do you know how to send invites?

would be nice to have more use this chat

room topic changed to Chinese Language: For students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. [bopomofo] [cantonese,] [chinese,] [hokkien,] [mandarin,] [pinyin,] [zhuyin,]

hippietrail

there's not a way to send invites

amateur

room topic changed to Chinese Language: For students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. [bopomofo] [cantonese] [chinese] [hokkien] [mandarin] [pinyin] [zhuyin]

hippietrail

as a workaround you can leave a comment with a link to the chat room on a post by the person, then remember to delete it later since it's usually off topic

travel is chat is usually busy, linguistics chat is usually empty

Standard Chinese phonology

This article summarizes the phonology of Standard Chinese, also known as Standard Mandarin. Actual production varies widely among speakers, as people inadvertently introduce elements of their native dialects. By contrast, television and radio announcers are chosen for their pronunciation accuracy and standard accent. Consonants The following is the consonant inventory of Standard Chinese, transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): {|class=wikitable style=text-align:center |+ Consonant phonemes of Standard Chinese |- ! !Labial !(Denti-)Alveolar !colspan="2"|Retroflex !(Al...

amateur

6:40 AM

maybe not many users or due to time zone

简体繁體にほんご한국어

hippietrail

oops i only wanted to link to a section of that wikipedia page

amateur

lol

did you copy and paste the text or link?

hippietrail

i'm starting to think the tofu thing is not about tone sandhi after all but about syllable reduction

i bet those two topics are confused and not helped by inconsistent tone marking in dictionaries

amateur

yeah, that's the one

but the problem still remains about when it happens?

hippietrail

exactly!

it's now one of my areas of interest

i wonder if it's as strong a thing in other chinese varieties

obviously strongly tied to the tone 0/5/neutral concept

and the tone 0/5/neutral is also related to tone sandhi but not as strongly

amateur

6:52 AM

i don't really notice these things though, especially when speaking. if you were to ask me the tones i probably wouldn't be able to guess correctly between 2 and 3 unless i memorized them for each character

so that's why i can't even answer about which words have neutral tone. i would just guess mostly the ones paired with 子

hippietrail

and tone sandhi is not really directly related to syllable reduction but i'm going to guess that more people have heard of the former but don't understand it deeply while more people haven't even heard of the latter. so their ideas are kind of fuzzily overlapping between them. but there's a few guesses in there.

yes zi is the obvious unstressed syllable as it's mostly meaningless, diminutive suffix, or just there more for prosodic reasons since chinese shifted from mostly single-syllable to mostly two-syllable words

i wonder if there are ever unstressed syllables other than in final position of multisyllable words?

amateur

i'm looking if there's any mention of "syllable reduction" in chinese

oh, that i think no. it should only be after

hippietrail

might be "非重读音节" in chinese but that might just be translationese

amateur

音节脱落 yīnjié tuōluò

your own works. stressed/unstressed syllable

found some pages in chinese about english language usage

hippietrail

doesn't seem to have a chinese wikipedia page. trying to see if it has a section of any chinese wikipedia page on the chinese language

chinese wikipedia doesn't even seem to have a page on "standard chinese phonology"

amateur

7:03 AM

can you read a decent amount of chinese?

hippietrail

no (-:

but i do lots of cross linguistic googling

amateur

wenku.baidu.com/view/f2501ed87f1922791688e848.html

page 5

语流音变 yǔliú yīnbiàn (variations in pronunciation)

hippietrail

somewhere in here maybe? zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

amateur

3、弱化：是音强变弱的现象。汉语轻声是弱化音节

4、脱落：一般和弱化有关，是极度弱化的结果。

豆腐 /tou fu/ -> /touf/

3. weakening syllable: phenomenon where strong syllable is weakened. Hanyu neutral tone is the weakening of a syllable.

4. reduction: generally related to syllable weakening, it's the result of the ultimate weakening.

and now i'll check your link

no mention. checking qingsheng (neutral tone) link

neutral tone cannot exist on its own and requires a preceding syllable to determine the tone

that's strange. 的 is neutral

some rules: zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

hippietrail

7:31 AM

yes i thought about 的 too.

but i was also wondering if there's cases where it's the first syllable of a pair, or middle of three syllables, etc

amateur

no, neutral can only be suffix, never prefix

hippietrail

it's another question whether chinese even has suffixes or prefixes. though -子 is the obvious yes answer. some people would think of -们 instead but that one might be debatable

not every last syllable is a suffix after all

amateur

isn't -们 a suffix? it's not a chinese character that means anything on its own. it was created specifically to be attached to 我你他 to make the plural pronoun.

輕聲的調值需要根據前一個音節決定調值，所以輕聲音節不可能獨立存在。

which means: "neutral tone cannot exist on its own and requires a preceding syllable to determine the tone"

hippietrail

well characters are only representations of speech so it's not really accurate to ask if a character is a suffix

some characters are recent inventions that are only distinguished in writing and never were distinguished in speech

i think the male/female 3rd person pronouns are an example

so ta1 is one word and 他 and 她 are two characters for the same word

remember that chinese like many many languages doesn't have or need a grammatical concept of plural just as it doesnt' have or need gender or definite or indefinite articles

but people whose native language has singular vs plural think of -们 as plurality because that's intuitive for them

just as people whose native lanuage definitely has suffixes will think of -们 as a suffix

so it may or may not be a suffix. i don't feel competent to judge. my english speaker bias is too strong and my knowledge of chinese is too weak

amateur

7:55 AM

that's 文言文 (wén yán wén classical) vs. 白话文 (bái huà wén vernacular/spoken)

hippietrail

maybe. i don't know.

amateur

interesting. so modern chinese began in 1920s

hippietrail

big language spoken over vast areas, especially empires, tend to go through all kinds of complex changes

due to having many non native speakers and social upheavals can lead to things like spoken colloquial registers being promoted to the status of a new standard register

so modern chinese is based on some people were already speaking but underwent standardization and promulgation

classical chinese was also an artificially standardized language with a vast number of non native speakers, especially through its writing system

amateur

yes, indeed

hippietrail

then again even though written classical chinese was the standard writing system in japan, korea, and vietnamese, not many people were literate in it. and probably not many people were literate in it in china either until relatively recently

i would say modern chinese has a small number of suffixes but much more limited in use compared to western languages, and that classical chinese possibly didn't really have suffixes at all and modern chinese might possibly not have prefixes at all. but that's a bunch of educated guesses.

amateur

8:07 AM

very good guesses :)

hippietrail

which is your first language?

not really helping me learn any more quickly though (-;

amateur

english isn't my first language but it's the one i'm most fluent in

hah, i took that literally.

are you taking any lessons? or all self taught?

你看得懂我写的字吗？

can you read that? or too much?

nǐ kàn de dǒng wǒ xiě de zì ma?

hmm, pinyin is easier to read sometimes

hippietrail

no i use my money for travelling rather than language lessons. i dabble in the languages of the places i travel to.

i'm really struggling with pinyin. it's so counterintuitive for a learner without a teacher or class. one of the reasons i decided to learn zhuyin as well.

i asked a new question by the way, totally different:

0

Q: Which term is used for "oyster" in Taiwan?

According to the English Wiktionary there are four Chinese terms equivalent to English "oyster": mǔlì : 牡蠣 / 牡蛎 hǎilìzi : 海蠣子 háo : 蚝 háozi : 蚝子 Is one of these standard or most common in Taiwan? What's the difference between them all?

amateur

answered lol

you should pick up some taiwanese if you're still in taiwan

it's a fun dialect

i think pinyin is easier and better for students. zhuyin much more time to learn and isn't useful outside taiwan.

hippietrail

8:24 AM

i don't think that's true. it relies on "useful" meaning only that you'd see it on signs or whatever

i feel it's also useful in giving a better insight to the sounds of mandarin that pinyin hides with its messy non 1:1 mapping between roman letters and chinese sounds

in pinyin "e" seems to have three sounds, "i" has two, "u" has two. the schwa sound has two spellings, either "e" or "i".

amateur

what are your thoughts on simplified chinese?

hippietrail

i like traditional script in theory but now that my eyes are getting old its easier to make out characters in simplified (-:

amateur

if it wasn't for taiwan and hong kong, traditional script wouldn't be used anymore

hippietrail

i recall reading that there's a bit of a revival amongst some people in the mainland, partly contributed to the fact that since you write via computer most of the time these days it's just as easy to write either way

amateur

some chinese are a bit fanatical though. they always debate about what's "authentic"chinese. so naturally they would say simplified chinese is not authentic and dumbs down the culture.

hippietrail

8:30 AM

i did often wonder how easily mainlanders could read historical characters which are often used in historical drama films but also in logos, scrolls, and other cultural contexts.

amateur

there's some even trying to revive 汉服 (Han clothing), trying to copy japan and korea which have kimono and hanbok

hippietrail

i think that's partly true but all rants about cultural purity are also partly hogwash

well i didn't see many mao suits when i was on the mainland either (-:

amateur

his generation are nearly dead. young people hardly know him

hmm, so you're learning mandarin in taiwan still. but how about hokkien?

hippietrail

cultural identify is healthy i think but sometimes tends to be abused in multicultral countries where one culture is promoted at the cost of the others

i was pleased to see tai yu and mongolian script all over the place in southern yunnan and inner mongolia though

it seems easier to immerse in and continue with mandarin. the only place i'm sure i've heard hokkien is on the MRT

amateur

lol

the more north of taiwan you are, the more they speak mandarin

go south and they'll mostly be speaking hokkien and maybe some hakkava

hippietrail

8:36 AM

i looked for a pocket dictionary with zhuyin in eslite bookstore yesterday but didn't really find anything

yeah in the next couple of days i want to head south. i have until the 23rd i think

is 蚵仔 used in mandarin in taiwan or just in hokkien?

amateur