More on tonal variation in Sinitic
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In a number of posts, we have discussed departure from stipulated tonal configurations in speech, e.g.:
"Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin "
"When intonation overrides tone"
"Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going?"
In this post, we will focus on the wide variation of tone in names for some family relationships.
In Taiwan Guoyu (Mandarin), 妹 is pronounced mèi, and 妹妹 ("younger sister") should be mèimei. But I've heard that it is often pronounced as měiméi in Taiwan as a sort of diminutive (as with other nuclear family member designations, for which see below).
According to Jason Cox,
…[w]hen someone's trying to pick up girls, the phrase used is bǎ mēi 把妹, where 妹 is invariably read in 1st tone (i.e., neither 4th tone nor neutral tone).
[VHM: After just this short survey, we have 妹 — which is listed in dictionaries as having the reading mèi — being pronounced in all four of the Mandarin tones plus the neutral tone.]
Loksin Loa notes:
…there was an old Mandarin slang term bǎ mǎzi 把馬子 ("pick up a girl; hit on a girl"), which is very seldom used now, and that's where the 把 comes from. In modern usage, the term 馬子 is replaced with 妹 meh/mei.
Now one might think the tone change indicates semantic difference between your sister and the girl you want to pick up; but this isn't totally evident, as the 妹 in làmèi 辣妹 ("Spice Girls") 4th tone and the 妹 of zhèngmèi 正妹 ("pretty girl; good-looking chick"), it seems, can be either 1st tone or 4th tone.
Is there any principle to these tonal variations of mèi 妹?
BTW, we also seem to have di3di2 ("younger brother", originally di4di4), ba3ba2 ("father", originally ba4ba), ma3ma2 ("mother", originally ma1ma1), ge3ge2 ("older brother", originally ge1ge1), and just maybe, sometimes a3yi2 ("auntie", originally a1yi2), which breaks the pattern on reduplicated characters)…, but I don't think any others. Not grandparents, not uncles, etc.
So far as you know, is there anything like this tonal variation for relationship names in Mainland Putonghua?
Melvin Lee, a native speaker of Taiwan Mandarin, observes:
As far as I know, 妹 means younger sister when it's pronounced as 4th tone. When pronounced as 1st tone, it means young girls, usually in a flirty tone. Therefore, the 妹 in 把妹 ("pick up a girl"), 正妹 ("good-looking chick"), 辣妹 ("Spice Girls") should all be pronounced as 1st tone. I know some people pronounce the 妹 in 辣妹 ("Spice Girls") as 4th tone, but I think that's actually a mistake.
As for 妹妹 pronounced as měiméi 美眉 (lit., "beautiful eyebrows"), originally that's a style of baby talk used in Taiwan. In fact, all the family terms are pronounced in the "3rd + 2nd" combination by kids, and these terms include parents, all the siblings, grandparents, even uncles and aunts. But again, now people in Taiwan also use měiméi 美眉 to refer to pretty, young girls.
I personally don't know where the odd use of 把 comes from, but I lean toward the explanation that it's influenced by the Taiwanese word pha 拋 [VHM: as in pha tshit-á 拋姼仔 ("pick up girls")]
For proof that yéyé 爺爺 ("grandpa") can be pronounced as yěyé, see these two videos, where the term is actually written as yěyé 也爺 (lit., "also father / master / lord / grandfather / old gentleman") to indicate the changed sound.
Julie Wei comments:
Well, there's ba3ba2 爸爸 or ba3ba1, and di3di2 弟弟, both as a form of address (i.e., 2nd person), or ba4ba 爸爸 (2nd person). My sister (who died at age 13) was called bao3bao1 寶寶 (both in 2nd person and 3rd person, though 3rd pers. was also bao3bao3). She was born in Beijing (Beiiping 北平then) and had a Beiping nai3ma1 奶媽 ("nanny"), so that must have been the Beiping pronunciation.
It seems that, in Taiwan Mandarin, they take more liberties with the tones than do folks on the Mainland. In other words, on the Mainland they tend to stick closer to the book than on Taiwan where tones appear to be modified for a variety of effects. My impression is at least partially substantiated by this comment from Liwei Jiao, author of a book on tones in Mainland Mandarin:
My personal sense is that Taiwan girls want to be ke3ai4 (adorable?) so they tend to challenge orthodox rules and alternate something. Of course they are bold enough to do that.
[Thanks to Jason Cox, Melvin Lee, Julie Wei, Liwei Jiao, and Sophie Wei]
John said,
September 1, 2014 @ 11:07 pm
妹 mei1 is a fairly recent innovation to the best of my knowledge; I don't remember hearing it much before the late 1990s. 辣妹 predated it by quite a bit, and was already in use in its "sexy girl" sense before it became the Chinese name of the Spice Girls. That's probably why 辣妹 is still sometimes (I would say usually) pronounced with mei4 instead of mei1.
And the 3-2 pattern for relatives definitely extends into uncles and aunts and grandparents, thus 叔叔 shu3shu2, 伯伯 bo3bo2, 奶奶 nai3nai2, etc. Sometimes I even hear 姑姑 gu3gu2, though gu1gu1 is more common. You also have 阿公 a2gong1 and 阿嬤 a2ma4, which follow half the pattern.
Despite this I would not say that Taiwan Mandarin speakers take more liberties with tone than mainland speakers, but that they take different liberties. To tie back to your previous post, Taiwan speakers would very seldom say ming2bai and definitely never ming2bai4, we would almost always say ming2bai2; and we would pronounce your name as a succession of three second-tone syllables. In addition we say 星期 xing1qi2 instead of xing1qi1, 企業 qi4ye4 instead of qi3ye4, etc.
Jongseong Park said,
September 2, 2014 @ 4:06 am
My personal sense is that Taiwan girls want to be ke3ai4 (adorable?) so they tend to challenge orthodox rules and alternate something.
I'm guessing that ke3ai4 is 可愛, which is apparently the root of Japanese kawaii かわいい? Where did this usage in Taiwan come from—is it a Japanese import?
DMT said,
September 2, 2014 @ 6:15 am
The (3-2) tone pattern in Taiwanese Mandarin is not restricted to family members, but is also a feature of vocabulary used in child-directed speech: e.g. gou3gou2 狗狗 "doggy"; xiong3xiong2 熊熊 "bear" (in practice, usually "teddybear").
@John:
I have often wondered about Mainland-Taiwanese divergences of tone in words like 星期, 企業 etc. Are these the result of divergent decisions by the relevant government bodies in each country, or have different patterns of colloquial usage influenced the standards?
@Jongseong Park:
Despite the similarities in sound and meaning, Japanese kawaii is etymologically unrelated to Chinese ke3ai4 可愛. According to the Nihon kokugo daijiten, it developed roughly as follows: kao "face" + hayushi "glowing" > (*kaohayushi) > kawahayushi "embarrassed" (c.1100-1200) > kawayushi (c.1100-1200) > kawaii (c.1400-1500), with the sense "embarrassed" gradually giving way to "pitiable" (c.1200-1300), "lovable" (c.1500-1800), then finally "cute" (c.1800+).
Zhiqiang Li (Andy Lee) said,
September 2, 2014 @ 3:13 pm
In the mainland of China, people in different regions also have different pronunciation of "妹". In Chengdu of Si'chuan province,I heard people say “xiao1mei3er0"(小妹儿); in Xi'an of Shannxi province, I heard people say "mei1zi0"(妹子); in Taiyuan of Shan'xi province, I also heard people say "mei1mei0"(妹妹)…in fact, I found in many dialects of Chinese, there are different tones for "妹".
Sometimes such dialect may become popular via internet. For example, "偶(ou3)" was once widely used to refer to “我(wo3)” on internet, which, according to my knowledge, might have come from Nan'jing dialect of Jiang'su province.
Jongseong Park said,
September 2, 2014 @ 3:36 pm
@DMT: Thanks for the detailed explanation on Japanese kawaii! So the kanji spelling 可愛い must be of relatively recent vintage (no older than c. 1500) and not indicative of its original etymology.
Eidolon said,
September 2, 2014 @ 5:07 pm
@Jongseong Park @DMT 可 + emotive is an old morphological construct found in Chinese texts, cf 可怜, 可笑, 可哀. 可愛 follows the same rule of word formation and examples of it being used in the sense of 'deserving love; inducing love' is found in texts going back 2,500 years. But the love described in these texts is not of the modern 'adorable' type, and in none of these usages does it have a connotation of 'cute' – that idea and the culture surrounding it is a modern phenomena. Thus, Mandarin 可愛 'cute' is liable to be a calque derived from Japanese kawaii due to the influence modern Japanese pop culture has had on its neighbors. For Taiwanese specifically see 「かわいい」についての一考察 by 周美鵑.
Having said that, I think we need to be careful with accepting the etymology of kawayushi>kawaii as a straight-forward case of a false cognate with Chinese 可愛. The resemblance is too uncanny. Literate Japanese surely knew the existence of 可 + emotive constructions in Chinese texts; it is not exactly rare; and the phonetic change of kawayushi>kawaii coupled with the phonetics of kawaii, which uses an irregular reading of 愛, doesn't look random. Even the semantic change of kawayushi from 'pitiable; helpless'>'lovable; cute' is not necessarily random and deserves further looking into. Specifically it is useful to know whether the 可愛 prefix was ever used to transcribe the root kawai before the modern period.
Jackson Lee said,
September 2, 2014 @ 5:34 pm
I was wondering where these cases of tonal variation in Taiwan Mandarin came from, apart from the account based on ke3ai4-ness. In particular, could such tonal variation be attributed to influences from other Sinitic varities? In Cantonese, for instance, many kinship terms have the following two tonal patterns (transcribed in the Jyutping romanization):
1. The 4-1 pattern (low-falling, then high-level)
baa4-baa1 爸爸 "father", maa4-maa1 媽媽 "mother", go4-go1 哥哥 "elder brother", etc.
2. The 4-2 pattern (low-falling, then high-rising)
mui4-mui2 妹妹 "younger sister", je4-je2 爺爺 "paternal grandfather", po4-po2 婆婆 "maternal grandmother", etc.
This tonal pattern is also highly productive (reduplicative hypocoristics, etc).
(For audio demonstrations, a lot of these kinship terms can be found here: http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/lin/cbrc/CantoneseGrammar/ [Multimedia –> Chapter 20: Cantonese speech conventions –> scroll down to "20.3 KINSHIP TERMS"] )
Perceptually, the Cantonese 4-2 pattern is very similar to the Taiwan Mandarin 3-2 pattern discussed in this post. And Taiwan is geographically—and culturally?—not far away from the Cantonese-speaking region. Given how widely and easily tone spreads by areal diffusion, there might be something about the mutual influences among Sinitic varities here?
DMT said,
September 3, 2014 @ 4:54 am
@Eidolon:
I think you are basically right about the relationship between modern Japanese kawaii and and Taiwanese ke3ai4 – thanks for the citation to the paper by Chou Mei-chuan.
Regarding the development of pre-modern Japanese kawaii, although it isn't possible to entirely exclude the possibility of influence from Chinese keai 可愛 the following facts suggest that such influence was at best minimal (this is all based on examples cited in Nihon kokugo daijiten rather than any extensive philological research of my own):
(1) The morphology of kawaii doesn't look like a borrowing from Chinese. Apart from the stem of the adjective being kawai rather than the expected kaai for 可愛 (although see below), the usual modern Japanese form for a word originally borrowed from Chinese would be a na-adjective such as *kawai-na (literary kawai-naru) rather than the regular i-adjective kawaii (literary *kawaishi). (There are exceptions to this pattern of borrowing morphology, but there doesn't seem to be any good reason to regard kawaii as one of them.)
(2) Early occurrences of kawaii are in texts written in a colloquial register rather than classical bungo 文語, and it appears in forms like kawaii koto かわいい事 rather than the literary *kawaiki koto かわいき事. (Note that the older kawayushi appears mostly with classical bungo morphology even in late sources where it means something like "cute, adorable": e.g. kawayuki take in the haikai 蝶とんでかはゆき竹のでたりけり [dated 1806-1811].) If the use of kawaii was supposed to reflect the author's familiarity with Chinese grammar and vocabulary we would expect to see it more often in bungo rather than in colloquial literature, but in fact we see the opposite.
DMT said,
September 3, 2014 @ 4:56 am
(3) Pre-modern Japanese scholars reading classical Chinese would usually read 可愛 in kundoku fashion as aisuru beshi, itsukushimu beshi, oshimu beshi, etc. This wouldn't preclude the possibility of influence, but it would make it less likely. The morpheme ka- 可 (Eng. "-able") was less productive in pre-modern Japanese than in either pre-modern Chinese or modern Chinese or Japanese; most of the vocabulary in contemporary Japanese containing this morpheme is post-Meiji.
DMT said,
September 3, 2014 @ 4:57 am
(4) Most of the pre-1600 occurrences of kawaii and related words seem to have been written in hiragana. Examples of kanji orthography with furigana in early modern literature look like ad-hoc choices by the authors rather than representations of a true etymology, e.g. kawairashiki 可愛（カハヒラシキ）in Koushoku ichidai onna 好色一代女 (1686); kawaii bou 可愛（カワイイ）坊, kawaisou na mono 可哀（カハイ）さうなもの, and kawaigaryaagatte 可愛（カハイ）がりゃアがつて, all in Ukiyoburo 浮世風呂 (1809-13).
(5) There was also a series of attested Edo-period forms kaai, kaairashii, kaaigaru, etc., and these forms were sometimes written as 可愛. However, these forms too appeared mostly in more colloquial registers of literature, and they seem to derive from the kawaii series rather than the other way around.
Eidolon said,
September 3, 2014 @ 4:48 pm
@DMT thanks for the explanations and examples from Nihon kokugo daijiten. I do have one comment: doesn't the appearance of ad hoc 可愛 orthography for kawai- rooted words in colloquial literature make an etymological influence more likely rather than less? A bungo 文語 author is liable to be tied to the classical usage of 可愛 and thus be less willing to make use of it in other contexts; indeed as you observed, they are liable to read it in a kundoku fashion anyhow. But a colloquial writer looking at the kanji 可愛 might be more willing to read it in a contemporary context and to be innovative in its interpretation. The Edo-period kaai- forms in fact supports this idea insofar as they change the phonetic reading of kawai- to match closer with the kanji 可愛 kaai used to transcribe it from time to time.
(1) and the example in (2) is duly observed, however. In any case, I think we ought to not go too off-topic, this is about tonal variation in Chinese.
DMT said,
September 8, 2014 @ 4:22 pm
@Eidolon: You seem to be suggesting that familiarity with the Chinese/kanbun expression 可愛 encouraged Japanese speakers to shift from kawayui to kawaii (and secondarily to kaai) – in other words, that a strictly-speaking "false" etymology was psychologically prominent enough that it ought to be considered as part of the "true" etymology. I suppose this is possible, but it would be pretty unusual – off the top of my head, I can't think of any parallel cases where a vague phonetic similarity between a native Japanese word and a Chinese loanword pushed the pronunciation of the former in the direction of the latter.
Eidolon said,
September 8, 2014 @ 6:54 pm
@DMT: "I can't think of any parallel cases where a vague phonetic similarity between a native Japanese word and a Chinese loanword pushed the pronunciation of the former in the direction of the latter."
Not phonetic similarity, but rather orthographic similarity, and here we do have many examples in East Asia, especially when using the Chinese writing system, in which phonetic transcriptions of loanwords take on a life of their own, lexicalizing into the native language not via the sounds they are transcribing, but via the semantics of the characters themselves.
Indeed, the case of Taiwanese raised earlier is a great example. I misspoke about it being a calque. It is not a calque but a loan-shift, in which Japanese kawaii, spelled with 可愛, literally changed the semantics of 可愛 itself in Taiwanese. That is to say, Taiwanese speakers did not hear kawaii and transcribe it 可愛, but instead they saw 可愛 used in the kanji orthography for kawaii, and equated it with native 可愛, thereby causing the loanshift. The phonetic similarity between kawaii and ke'ai did not push Taiwanese speakers into pronouncing 可愛 as kawaii, and also did not cause Taiwanese speakers to start thinking of 可愛 as kawaii. What achieved this shift was the orthography.