Language Log

People are always trying to exoticize things Chinese.  Now comes this article with the sensationalistic and patently suspect headline:

"If you speak Mandarin, your brain is different" (2/24/15)

The following video is very popular in China now:

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.

A few months ago on the Penn campus I heard a Chinese guy and a girl having a conversation in Mandarin, and I was surprised when he twice said, "Wo3 ming2bai4 le."  The rest of his speech was standard, but then he came out with this strange transformation of "Wo3 ming2bai le".  Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised, because I've heard the exact same thing before.  Nonetheless, it still sounded odd to me, since from first-year Mandarin on I've had it drilled into me that this sentence should be pronounced "Wo3 ming2bai le" and that any other pronunciation of ming2bai was wrong.  This was reinforced by the canonical pronunciation ming2bai given in dictionaries and other authoritative sources.

Somebody gave a friend of Rose Hill this coin purse as a gift:

Recently we've had several discussions about how tones in Sinitic languages aren't as uncomplicated or inflexible as one might imagine or as is often claimed:

"When intonation overrides tone"

"Mandarin by the numbers"

In these posts and in the comments to them, we have seen how stress and musical tune / melody often override or distort the canonical tones for given morphosyllables in sung or spoken context.  This is a completely different matter than tone sandhi, where tones are modified according to their position within a sequence of syllables (I believe that most instances of tone sandhi occur for simple physiological reasons, e.g., in normal speech it is virtually impossible to pronounce two full third tones in a row because they both dip so low in an individual's register that one needs a means for readying oneself for the onset of the utterance of the second third tone and does this by changing the first third tone utterance to a rising second tone).

Practically everybody has heard of the fabled Grass Mud Horse (cǎonímǎ 草泥马), which is a pun for "f*ck your mother" (cào nǐ mā 肏你妈). China Digital Times, which pioneered research on "sensitive words", including "Grass Mud Horse", has just introduced a new feature, which should prove to be a useful resource for China scholars and journalists: "Two Years of Sensitive Words: Grass-Mud Horse List".

You will observe that not one of the tones of cǎonímǎ 草泥马 ("Grass Mud Horse") matches the corresponding tone in the original cào nǐ mā 肏你妈 ("f*ck your mother"), yet no one has the slightest difficulty in comprehending that the former is meant as a pun for the latter.