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When I began studying Mandarin over half a century ago, I very quickly developed a pet phrase  (kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 / 口头禅):  lǎoshí shuō 老實說 / 老实说 ("to tell the truth; honestly"), After I married one of the best Mandarin teachers on earth (Chang Li-ching) several years later, she corrected me when I said my favorite phrase.  She told me that I made it sound like lǎoshī shuō 老師說 / 老师说 ("teacher says").

Now, I know my tones very well, and can tell the difference between first and second tone.  I'm also able to produce them clearly and distinctly.  So it wasn't a problem with my being incapable of distinguishing tonally in my speech between lǎoshí shuō and lǎoshī shuō.  Something else was wrong with the way I said "lǎoshí shuō" ("honestly speaking") that made it sound like "lǎoshī shuō" ("teacher says").  I think it had to do with the sorts of things discussed in this post and in other posts to which it links:

"Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin" (11/8/17)

Now that we have readily available the large Švarný-Tang-Harbsmeier MILK corpus described in the preceding post, with waveform & spectrogram, formants, pitch, and selection stats, it should be possible to study these subtle — but significant — aspects of Mandarin speech scientifically.  For the present moment, I will provide some other types of evidence in support of the importance of phonological phenomena such as stress, emphasis, elongation, shortening, and pausation* for Mandarin speech production.

[*I realize that this is not an established technical term in linguistics, but I strongly believe that things like pauses, rhythm, cadence, etc. are extremely important in the way languages are pronounced.  Even in my Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese classes, I always have the students read the sentences aloud before they attempt to translate and explicate their meaning.  Often, just from the rhythm and cadence of their reading, including where they put pauses, I can tell whether they have a grasp of the basic structure of the sentence in question.]

Kevin Nelson has provided this very important information about the pronunciation of lǎoshī 老师 ("teacher"):

When I worked at a university in China, I noticed that in 老師, the 師 always seemed stressed and longer… I'm not sure how to explain it. I never saw that written up in any textbook about speaking Chinese. It is the "longer" part that is hard to describe… it is like making a quarter note into a dotted quarter note. (I was in Xi'an.)

I love this comment!  It is extremely important for understanding how Mandarin is spoken in reality, not according to a dictionary or a textbook.  Of course, we can't do without good textbooks and good dictionaries (lord knows I've done my share in this life to produce them!), but we also need to pay attention to the tiniest details of actual spoken language.  I dare say that it was some feature such as that pointed out by Kevin — and not the tones —  that foiled me in my attempts to pronounce lǎoshí shuō 老實說 / 老实说 ("to tell the truth; honestly") properly.  More about that below.

This morning in my "Language, Script, and Society in China" class, I tested the students on how they said lǎoshī 老师 ("teacher") vs. how they said lǎoshí 老实 ("honest").  Every single one of the native speakers (about ten) lengthened the second syllable of lǎoshī 老师 ("teacher"), exactly as Kevin described.

Something similar happened when I was in Nepal (1965-67).  I was extremely fluent in spoken Nepali, being able to speak rapidly, clearly, and at length on any subject I wished.  But there were certain niceties that escaped me, such as the precise difference between cār चार् ("four") and cha छ ("six").   I was familiar with all the phonemic features (including vowel length and aspiration) of these two words, but when I put them all together, what came out of my mouth just didn't sound right to native speakers.  It was very frustrating, because no matter how hard I tried something was lacking in the way I pronounced cār चार् ("four") and cha छ ("six").

There was another word that I always innocently, but most embarrassingly, mispronounced in Nepal.  What I intended to say was jhiknu ("take out; extract"), but what I ended up with was more like ciknu ("chiknu"), i.e., "fuck". (The initial of this word is unvoiced unaspirated, like the Mandarin initial written 'z' in pinyin.)  It was bad enough when I tried to say jhiknu, but when I sang Old MacDonald and got to the part about "Here a chick there a chick, everywhere a chick-chick!", there would invariably be uproarious laughter.

As I've pointed out endlessly on Language Log, tones are not sacrosanct in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages.  The closer we get to observing spoken Mandarin in the raw (not transcribed according to any preconceived standards), the more it becomes clear that there are all sorts of changes in the way words are pronounced in real life that are not reflected in standard, prescriptive romanizations.

Yesterday one of my graduate students from China told me about a foreign student who has a superlative command of the tones for a couple thousand characters, but when she speaks Mandarin, it is excruciating for native speakers to listen to her.  My student says that this foreign student sounds as though she is parodying what Mandarin sounds like.

For one example of the sorts of transformations that regularly occur in actual speech, a linguist informant recently wrote to me:  "I should also mention that neutral tones after second tones nowadays sound like fourth tones."  This is interesting, because I wrote about this exact phenomenon already over two years ago in this post:

"Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin" (8/26/14)

Further evidence for the shift of neutral to 4th tone is found in the pronunciation of wáwa 娃娃 ("doll; baby; child; moppet"), which the dictionaries tell us should have a neutral tone on the second syllable.  The graduate students from China who come to Penn are much amused by the convenience stores named "Wawa" (the Ojibwe word for "wild goose") in the Philadelphia area.  When discussing the similarity of "Wawa" to wáwa 娃娃 ("doll; baby; child; moppet"), they always pronounce the latter very clearly as "wáwà".  I was amazed to discover that even Google Translate's recording of the term pronounces it that way, even though their Pinyin has wáwá.

All of this shows that the phenomenon of neutral –> 4th tone is something that exists in the pronunciation of native speakers (every single one of my graduate students from the mainland pronounces it that way).  And there are many other similar adjustments in Mandarin and the other Sinitic topolects as they are spoken in diverse places in China and in the Sinophone diaspora.

So we have to be prepared to accept that the reality of spoken tonal languages does not always and necessarily mechanically follow the prescriptive tones given in dictionaries and textbooks.  With that in mind, let's return to the way I uttered my pet phrase, lǎoshí shuō 老實說 / 老实说 ("to tell the truth; honestly"), which made it sound to native speakers like lǎoshī shuō 老師說 / 老师说 ("teacher says").

In an attempt to narrow down where the problem lies, let's look at a whole series of common Mandarin words that consist of the syllables "lao" and "shi" in various combinations of tones:

lǎoshī 老师 ("teacher")
lǎoshì 老是 ("always")
lǎoshí 老实 ("honest")
lǎo shì 老式 ("old-fashioned")
lǎo shī 老湿 ("Always Wet" — nickname of a person)
lǎo shí 老石 ("Old Stone" — name of a person / film)
lǎo shí 老十 ("Old Ten" — generational name of a person)  I actually knew a guy who was called 十三老 ("Old Thirteen") — he was a Dungan and pronounced that "Sushanlo".  In a big, extended family, you could easily have an "Old Ten".

I maintain that if you pronounce these words with all the "correct" tones but do not pay attention to suprasegmental and prosodic features, you will sound unnatural to native speakers.

Although these categories may not even exist in basic phonological analysis, I'm sure that some of these disyllabic terms do have at least micropauses between syllables and differential stress, because I've been listening very carefully to how people say these things for fifty years and can detect how such features consistently occur in spoken language.

Aside from the fact that it is my natural bent, part of the reason why I am so attentive to such details is that, at Harvard, I was fortunate to study with Rulan (Iris) Chao Pian who had a handbook for the pronunciation of Mandarin that was quite long (I think that it was based on the work of her father, Y[uen] R[en] Chao, the renowned Chinese linguist), and many pages were devoted to the explication of rather arcane sequences of tones.  This handbook also paid attention to prosodic phrasing and other non-tonal phenomena.

Many of the points covered in the Chao-Pian pronunciation handbook are systematically presented in Y. R. Chao's masterful A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (Zhōngguóhuà de wénfǎ 中國話的文法) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California Press, 1968).  Under "stress", the index (p. 843a) lists the following topics:

and tone as word markers

as marker of logical predicate

contrasting str.

medium str.

neutral tone, or zero str.

occurrence of

normal str.

str. patterns in compds.

Chao discusses how stress, rapidity of speech, and other prosodic features affect vowel height, voicing, aspiration, and other phonemic qualities.  Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson, in Mandarin Chinese:  A Functional Reference Grammar (Hànyǔ yǔfǎ 漢語語法) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California Press, 1981), p. 9, summarize some of Chao's observations on neutral tone as follows:

If a syllable has a weak stress or is unstressed, it loses its contrastive, relative pitch and therefore does not have one of the four tones….  In such a case, the syllable is said to hve a neutral tone.

They go on to explain that the neutral tone is not always at the same pitch, but is dependent upon the tone which precedes it.

Even if a student grasps all of Chao's findings on the phonological implications of prosodic and suprasegmental features and attempts to apply them conscientiously, their speech will sound awkward and unnatural.  The only way to speak Mandarin (or any other Sinitic topolect) well is to emulate the connected flow of whole sentences as uttered by native speakers, rather than attempt to insert isolated lexical items in grammatical templates.

Coming back to the question of how "lao" and "shi" in various tones are linked, one of my mainland students made the following changes to the items in my list of "laoshi" terms:

lǎoshī 老师
lǎoshì 老是 –> ˈlǎoˈshì
lǎoshí 老实  –> lǎo shi
lǎo shì 老式
lǎo shī 老湿
lǎo shí 老石 –> lǎoshí
lǎo shí 老十 –> lǎoshí

There were many other variations in the way other members of the class pronounced these terms.

I also had all the students say this sentence:  lǎoshī lǎoshì lǎoshí 老师老是老实 ("the teacher is always honest").  As pronounced by the students, the three words of the sentence differed not just in their tones, but also in the lengths of the syllables, whether there were short pauses (micropauses) between syllable, the relative speeds with which the syllables were pronounced in the different vocables, whether some of the syllables had stress, and so forth.  One of the students commented:  "I think the last character should be neutral instead of the second tone just because it's at the end of the sentence".

Although there may be no well-established standards or procedures for specifying and measuring the types of suprasegmental and prosodic features described in this post, as well as the nonprescriptive tonal transformations that we have observed, there can be no doubt that they are real, that they actually exist in the way people speak, and that they make a difference in the way others who hear them perceive what they say.

To end where this post began, probably the reason my "lǎoshí shuō 老實說 / 老实说" ("to tell the truth; honestly") was misheard by others as "lǎoshī shuō 老師說 / 老师说" ("teacher says") is not because I got my tones wrong, but because I drew out or emphasized the second syllable too much.  After all these years of practice and hearing others say it correctly, I'm doing better with it now than when I began speaking Mandarin half a century ago.

Appendix (advanced "lao + shi" studies)

láoshī 劳师 ("tire the troops; take greetings and gifts to army units")
láoshī dòngzhòng 劳师动众 ("mobilize the masses")
láoshī xíyuǎn 劳师袭远 ("mobilize troops to attack at a distance")
láoshí / láoshi 牢实 ("solid; strong; firm")
lǎoshī 老师 ("teacher")
lǎoshīfu 老师父 ("elderly teacher; mullah")
lǎoshīfū / lǎoshīfu 老师傅 ("elderly teacher; mullah; experienced worker; master craftsman")
lǎoshīsùrú 老师宿儒 ("elderly, learned Confucian scholar")
lǎoshí / lǎoshí 老实 ("honest; frank; well-behaved; simpleminded; naive; easily taken in")
lǎoshíbājiāo 老实巴交 ("cautious and timid; ingenuous")
lǎoshíbājiǎo / lǎoshibājiāo 老实巴脚 ("honest [fool]; simple; open-faced; good-natured")
lǎoshígēdā / lǎoshigēda 老实疙瘩 ("honest and trustworthy person")
lǎoshíhuà / lǎoshihuà 老实话 ("frank, straightforward speech")
lǎoshítóu / lǎoshitóu 老实头 ("a naive person; simpleton")
lǎoshì 老式 ("old-fashioned")
lǎo shì 老是 ("always")
lǎoshì 老视 ("presbyopia")
lǎoshìyǎn 老视眼 ("presbyopia")
láoshígǔzi / láoshígúzi 劳什骨子 ("detestable thing")
láoshígǔzǐ 牢什古子 ("disgusting thing")
lāoshízǐ / lāoshízi 捞什子 ("encumbrance; burden")
láoshízǐ / láoshízi 劳什子 / 牢什子 / 僗什子 ("obnoxious / unpleasant / disagreeable / nasty / distasteful / offensive / objectionable / unsavory / unpalatable / off-putting / awful / terrible / dreadful / frightful / revolting / repulsive / repellent / repugnant / disgusting / odious / vile / foul / abhorrent / loathsome / nauseating / sickening / hateful / insufferable / intolerable / detestable / abominable / despicable / contemptible / horrible / horrid thing")

N.B.:  In speech, the "lao + shi" portion of these terms would not uniformly and mechanically be articulated according to the pronunciations specified in dictionaries.

[Thanks to Mark Liberman, Heidi Harley, Boyd Mikhailosvsky, Tod Ragsdale, William Page, Bill Hanson, Carl Hosticka, Bob Badgley, Wayne Stinson, Jinyi Cai, and Tom Bishop,]

November 15, 2017 @ 1:39 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Errors, Grammar, Pronunciation, Prosody, Tones

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