Language Log

"What Genghis Khan's Mongolian Sounded Like – and how we know" (10/30/18)

A key concept in traditional Chinese phonology is the distinction between "clear" (qīng 清) and "muddy / turbid / murky" (zhuó 濁).  Although it is mainly applied to the sounds of language, the qīng 清-zhuó 濁 distinction also has applications / implications for music.

Roughly speaking, the linguistic and musical correlations are qīng 清 ("clear; high pitch") and zhuó 濁 ("muddy; low pitch").  Also applicable to music are the wǔshēng 五聲 ("five musical tones [of the pentatonic scale])": gōng 宮, shāng 商, jué 角, zhǐ 徵, and yǔ 羽 — equivalent to do, re, mi, sol, and la in western solfège. (source)

I've often wondered how and when these terms arose, how they function in historical phonology, and how they correlate with usages in modern linguistics.  I asked several specialists in Chinese historical linguistics their opinion on these matters.

[This is a guest post by Markus Mikjalson.]

A protester holds a placard that reads "Do not forget 831 terror attack, truth needs to be seen on CCTV" during a demonstration at a Hong Kong mall on Aug. 30 on the eve of the first anniversary of the Prince Edward MTR station incident when police stormed the station to make arrests during massive anti-government protests. (Photo: AFP)

(Source)

Some folks think that intonation never overrides tones, but I'm convinced on the basis of empirical evidence that it does.

For example:

Nǐ xiǎng gàn hā 你想干哈 –> Nǐ xiǎng gàn há 你想干哈 ("what do you want to do?") — especially in the Northeast.

Here are some other examples — all of them provided by native speakers of MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin):

So this version of Kimberley Guilfoyle at the RNC Monday evening is unfair, but funny:

"What 'Ancient' Chinese Sounded Like – and how we know" (YouTube 7:56)

Source

It's not just flapping and voicing of /t/ in words like litter (= "lidder") or pretty (= "priddy"), and word sequences like fat Albert (= "fad Albert"). American speakers tend to weaken all consonants and even consonant clusters in similar environments. So if you take today's ubiquitous "mask debate" news, and add the perceptual biases of someone from an r-less dialect like John Oliver, you get this:

What's your instinct?  How many syllables do you think there are in the following words?

kawaii かわいい (Japanese for "cute")

Kawai カワイ (the Japanese piano manufacturer)

Kauaʻi (name of one of the Hawaiian islands)

In English, it's our habit to treat diphthongs consisting of two vowels as one syllable, but that's not the way they do it in Japanese, which has no diphthongs.

There is a phenomenon in Japanese publishing called "san-gō zasshi  三号雑誌", which refers to a short-lived magazine that puts out three issues and then folds.  Sino-Platonic Papers, a scholarly journal I started in 1986, just put out its 300th issue, and we're still going strong, with about ten more issues in the pipeline, and others lined up to come after that.

The latest issue is "Between the Eyes and the Ears: Ethnic Perspective on the Development of Philological Traditions, First Millennium AD", by Shuheng Zhang and Victor H. Mair, which appeared yesterday (July 19, 2020).

Abstract

The present inquiry stands as a foray into what may be thought of as a “Summa Philologica Sinica.” To be more precise, this paper is about the study and developmental trajectory of philology rather than philology per se. The approach here, drawing on the prefaces and comments of primary historical resources, conceives of philology as subject to the transitions of philosophy, an amalgam within which variegated traditions and schools contend and consent with each other, rather than as a static, ahistorical antithesis between the study of script and that of sound. The bifocal panoply behind philological texts and the shì 勢 (“immanent configuration”) that oscillates between indigenous systems of thought and foreign philosophy, defense of nationality and openness to foreign voices, reflected in the realm of language studies, presents itself as focused on characters (eyes) versus sounds (ears).

[This is a guest post by John Carlyle written in response to the following comment by E. Bruce Brooks to "Similes for female pulchritude in an ancient Chinese poem" (7/1/20):

The formation of the Shr* corpus is currently under serious study, and it can be said with some certainty at this preliminary stage that this particular poem was added to the growing Shr collection at the end of the 05c. How much older it may be, in its own country (Wei) will depend on scrutiny of its dialect position: some of the poems from that area show traces of (original) local pronunciation; others do not. Stay tuned.

*Shījīng 詩經, aka Poetry Classic, Classic of Poetry, Shijing, Shih-ching, Book of Songs, Book of Odes, Odes, or Poetry.]

   There is justification that Wey's 衛 dialect position might suggest something about the age of some of the poems in the Wey airs. The dialect position of Wey is better understood for the later period. What that might suggest about earlier poetry is still not clear. I'll try to give a quick summary of what we know so far.

   At least by the time of Fangyan 《方言》, Wey belonged to an eastern group of Chinese dialects. The exact limits of this eastern group are not entirely settled nor are the phonological features shared by the group since studies of Fangyan are primarily lexical. Since the time of Lin Yutang's (1927) first approximation of Fangyan dialect boundaries, the dialects of Wey and Song have been grouped together. Later scholars also included neighboring states like Qi (but not "Eastern Qi") and Lu. More recently, Matsue Takashi (1999, 2006, 2013) argues that the eastern group's boundaries extent as far as Chen and that the dialect of Chen was a transitional dialect between the eastern and southern groups due to Chu incursion (2006, 2013).

If you're looking for words with lots of consonants and few or seemingly no vowels, try Eastern Europe, especially Czechia.

I have a friend named Stu Cvrk, and I asked him the story of his surname and how to pronounce it.  Here's what he told me:

It is Czech. The Czech pronunciation is "tsverk". My grandparents Americanized it a bit to make it easier to say, as we now pronounce it "swerk."

The story of its derivation according to family lore is this:

This morning, someone sent me a message that began, "Welp, at least word boundaries are respected…".  I had no idea what he meant by the first syllable.  It didn't even seem like a word to me.  Or, I thought, perhaps it's a typo for "well".

Still, I was curious, so I looked around a bit, and found this entry in Merriam-Webster:

"Yes, 'Welp' Is a Real Word:  'Welp' is over 70 years old"

Update: This word was added in March 2018.

Social media is a place where informal language flourishes, which means that lexicographers get to chronicle the exploits of words that don't have much written use in edited prose—words like welp.

Chicago Tribune Tweet:  Welp, here comes the 1st accumulating snowfall of this winter….

Yep, the Chicago Tribune used welp. And yet:

Doug Lambert Tweet:  "Welp" is not a word….