Polysyllabism in Sinitic and (phonemic) syllable stress
AntC wrote:
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AntC wrote:
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In my latest (of many) posts on that redoubtable sinograph, biáng ("Annals of Biang, Vienna edition" [1/3/25]), I posed this question: "How do we know that this character is to be pronounced in the second tone?"
Chris Button sensibly queried in reply: "So, something aside from the syllable being a phonotactic violation?"
Later, he elaborated, "Even if biang (regardless of tone) were allowed in 'standard' Mandarin, the second tone would not be allowed in any case. So we have a double violation of sorts: one on the phonemic level, and one on the tonemic level." This too is sensibly spoken.
The Xi'an topolect does have the tripthong -iang. (source)
The tones of Xi'an topolect, though four in number, are conspicuously different from those of MSM. (source)
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New book in the Cambridge University Press Elements (in Phonetics) series: The Phonetics of Taiwanese, by Janice Fon and Hui-lu Khoo (12/11/24):
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Grammatically, that is a choice question: "is it city[-like] (or not)?" In other words, is whatever is at question sophisticated / modern? This phrase, which has been chosen by Sixth Tone* (12/17/24) as one of the top ten Chinese buzzwords of 2024 (I will list the other nine in the Appendix) is composed of two identical English loanwords and the most common negative particle in Mandarin.
Before explaining this viral phenomenon further, I will show a video featuring "city不city" to demonstrate that it is real:
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The comments on "Hypertonal conlang" (12/8/2024) include a lengthy back-and-forth about where the syllable break should be located in English words like "Cheryl". I was surprised to see that no one brought up the concept of ambisyllabicity, which has been a standard and well-accepted idea in phonology and phonetics for more than 50 years. It continues to be widely referenced in the scholarly literature — Google Scholar lists about 2,170 papers citing the term, and 260 since 2020.
The most influential source is Dan Kahn's 1976 MIT thesis, “Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology”. There's more to say about the 1970s' introduction into formal phonology of structures beyond phoneme strings (or distinctive feature matrices), but that's a topic for another time.
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The PRC uses hànyǔ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ("Sinitic spelling") for phonetic annotation, Taiwan uses zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 ("phonetic symbols") for the same purpose. Since we are well acquainted with pīnyīn, but not very familiar with zhùyīn fúhào, I will focus on the latter in this post:
Mark Swofford, "If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English", Pinyin News (5/7/23):
Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.
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Juliana Kim and Miguel Macias, "Satellite images show the devastation from Spain's deadly floods", NPR 11/2/2024 [emphasis added]:
Satellite images show a devastating transformation of eastern Spain, where catastrophic flash floods have killed more than 200 people and upended entire towns.
NASA Earth Observatory captured the image from its Landsat 8 satellite a day after the historic downpour. It showed parts of the eastern province of Valencia submerged in floodwaters. Meanwhile, the channel of the Turia river and the L'Albufera coastal wetlands were filled with the sentiment-laden deluge.
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Please do not check in a dictionary or online before you try to pronounce the name just by looking at it.
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[This is a guest post by German Dziebel, commenting on "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23).]
I will strike a dissenting note here. The two roots in question – *g’enH1 and *gʷenH2 are likely cognates. There seems to be a non-random distribution of palatalized and labialized velars in IE stems with nasals – palatovelars are favored in stems with m, while labiovelars are favored in stems with n. E.g.,
nGʷ roots: *nogʷno- 'naked', *nogʷt- 'night', *snoigʷho- 'snow', *h₂ongʷo- 'anoint', *h1ngwni- 'fire', *negʷhro- 'kidney', *gʷenh₂ 'wife', *kʷoino- 'price', *penkʷe- '5', *h₁lengʷʰ- 'light', *gʷʰen- 'slay, strike', *sengʷh- 'sing', *neigʷ- 'wash'
vs.
mG'-roots: *H3moiǵhlo- (assimilated to njegull(ë) in Gheg Alb), *meǵh₂s 'great', *meh₂ǵ- 'smear, anoint', *ǵheyōm 'winter', *dheǵhōm 'earth', *ḱoimo- 'household, family', *mreǵh-, *mosgho- 'brain', *h₂melǵ- 'milk', *smeḱur 'chin, beard', *deḱm̥ '10', *h1ḱm̥tóm '100' *h₂émǵʰu- 'narrow' (Hitt hamenk- 'tie, bind').
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Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:
The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.
Andy McCarthy responded:
Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.
And Rich Lowry agreed:
Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through
Ben Zimmer emailed me:
Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)
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Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:
For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.
But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.
“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
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[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.]
Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese).
The atypical feature I've found most mysterious is the tendency to pronounce the Middle Chinese 去 tone as 陰平. I haven't managed to find a consistent pattern in the words affected by this tonal shift.
Just for context: I unfortunately do not know which part of the island my grandparents are from. I was told ethnic tensions within the Chinese community in the island of Tanjung Pinang (where they eventually settled) discouraged them from transmitting any kind of information about this to their children. Looking at phonetic data compiled online (from the dialect dictionary kaom.net as well as recordings of Hainanese), it seems that our family lect most resembles Qionghainese (瓊海話).
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