Tones, Then and Now
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[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]
I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday:
VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.
My first Chinese language instructor, Beverly (Hong Yuebi) Fincher, used Chao Yuan-ren's Mandarin Primer. Later I studied a couple years, full-time, at the "Stanford Center" (Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies) hosted by National Taiwan University. Subsequent to that, a half decade later, I spent a year in Mandarin interpreter training at the government's Foreign Service Institute Branch School in Taiwan. In my "spare time" during that program, I studied daily an hour of Shanghainese and "Taiwanese" (i.e., Hoklo, or southern Min, or whatever).
So when I arrived in Beijing spring 1976 on the first of my three postings there, and encountered what you describe, on something as basic and oft-heard as gongchandang 共產黨, I concluded that my memory and/or learning and/or articulation skills were horribly deficient. (They probably were, but that's another story.) I convinced myself that I must have a real issue in distinguishing adequately between first and fourth tones.
Very parenthetically, I found peculiarly useful for tone-learning/reinforcement the necessity to listen "solemnly" to the guógē 國歌 ("national anthem") in movie theaters prior to the showing of the film. The characters were printed on screen as patriotic images floated by, and the tones in each of the four-character sets were pronounced in the purest Beijing-style Mandarin (i.e., not with the distinctive southern Mandarin pronunciation heard in Taipei at the time).
[VHM: I had the same experience with regard to solemnly singing the national anthem of the Republic of China before the film was shown, though, in addition, I also couldn't help but think of Sun Yat-sen (who penned it) and his Three People's Principles, plus Abraham Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".]
—–
During my two years at the Stanford Center, I commuted via motorcycles (a Suzuki 125 and a Honda 150). They were fairly reliable beasts, but of course needed maintenance and minor repairs from time to time. So I early learned my share of "motorcycle-repair" vocabulary to be deployed when I took in my noble steed to one of the local shops.
I still remember vividly that the workers at one "complimented" me on my Mandarin … but added the observation that "However, you foreigners do not seem able to pronounce correctly the word 是 … none of you say 'si'/szu' but make some very foreign sound." By which they meant 'shi.'
I then did my rendition of 44 stone lions, all using "si" instead of "shi" where needed, which duly impressed them. And puzzled them. "So why if you CAN make that sound, do you not do so when speaking Guóyǔ 國語 ('Mandarin')?"
Reflecting my youth and lack of good sense, I told them that Mandarin, which we were taught to speak in its northern/Beijing pronunciation, has both the "si" and the "shi" sounds. To their disbelief, I countered by asking if they had not been taught the zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 or ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, ㄈ ("bo po mo fo"; "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols") system in their schools.
A conundrum. And I knew I was pushing my luck for a gāo bízi 高鼻子 ("big / high / long nose") so I left it there, and we parted friends until the next time I needed a part or a repair.
[end of guest post]
Selected readings
- "A Hainanese mystery" (8/21/24)
- "Hypercorrect Mandarin tones" (10/15/23)
Chau said,
August 22, 2024 @ 10:23 am
“Yes” is a basic word in any language, no?
In Italian it is sì, in Spanish si, etc. In Taiwanese it is sī.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 22, 2024 @ 12:05 pm
Chau,
There isn't a "yes" in many Celtic languages. In Irish, for example, if someone asks you a yes/no question, you answer "yes" by repeating the verb in the question.
Anthony said,
August 22, 2024 @ 12:58 pm
Latin, too, has no 'yes.'
Philip Taylor said,
August 22, 2024 @ 2:27 pm
I am happy to take your word for that, Anthony, but Google Tranlate would have us believe otherwise —
Philip Anderson said,
August 22, 2024 @ 2:37 pm
Welsh is similar to Irish: ‘ie’ and ‘nage’ are used when something other than the verb is emphasised, and ‘do’ or ‘naddo’ in the past, but normally the verb is repeated – are you going? I am.
Latin lacked a single word, but the various Romance languages developed different ones from different responses: si[m], oui, oc.
Philip Anderson said,
August 22, 2024 @ 2:46 pm
@Philip Taylor
Any idea can be translated, but the very number of words that can be translated as ‘yes’ (i.e. express agreement) shows that there was no single word for the concept. You can do the same in English, as in the party game where ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are banned.
John Rohsenow said,
August 22, 2024 @ 3:53 pm
Speaking of Taiwan's Zhu Yin Fu Hao kana-like syllabary, which I suppose is still used in TW, I recall that WAY back (can it really have been more than half a century?!) when I was still a beginning language student at Michigan and an instructor at their English Language Institute, I had an ESL student, a native Taiwanese speaker, who did/could? not distinguish final -n vs. -ng in English. I asked her to write and pronounce the two symbols for those two sounds in "bo-po-mo-fo", which she did, pronouncing and differentiating between them quite clearly. It turned out she COULD make the two sounds, but ONLY when she pronounced the ZYFH "alphabet" (forgive me, Victor). I left
her muttering to herself "-n, -ng" and when back to my linguistics classes.
David Marjanović said,
August 22, 2024 @ 4:59 pm
No. In addition to what's been said, and to the lack of such a word in Mandarin (the most common strategies there are to use "is" or "correct"), consider the diversity of "yes" words in Romance: Italian and Spanish, as you say, use descendants of Latin sic "just so", "that way"; Occitan uses a descendant of Latin hoc "this one"; French uses a descendant of hoc ille, literally "this that one"; Romanian has borrowed da from Slavic; and Classical Latin (older than the last common ancestor of all Romance languages) used none of these – its most common strategy seems to have been ita'st, "so [it] is".
The mentioned da is used in the East Slavic and the "South Slavic" languages, but Polish goes for tak, which also means "so, thus, this way", whenever it doesn't use no "well, yeah" (the same word as Russian "but"!); Slovak has borrowed northern German ja; Czech has borrowed southern German jo, except when it uses the intensifier ano instead. Within Russian, da can also mean "even" and "and" (in archaic registers).
Finally, if the Taiwanese sī is 是, that used to be a demonstrative pronoun not unlike Latin hoc. 是 is actually used as a demonstrative pronoun in some places in the inconsistently archaizing "44 stone lions" text.
Victor Mair said,
August 22, 2024 @ 7:57 pm
One of the most common ways of asking a question in Mandarin, which we learn during the first year, is called the "yes-no question". It is posed thus: "V + neg. V".
To answer in the affirmative, i.e., "yes", you just repeat the verb, hence "V".
To answer in the negative, i.e., "no", you use "neg. V".
We also call this the "choice question".
Benjamin Geer said,
August 23, 2024 @ 2:36 am
Once when I lived in Cairo, I was talking to some young people in Egyptian Arabic (EA), and I used the word "salt" (ملح), inadvertently using the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) pronunciation (/milḥ/) instead of the EA one (/malḥ/). They laughed and said that sounded like something one of their relatives with a rural dialect would say. They seemed to be unaware of the MSA pronunciation.
Benjamin Geer said,
August 23, 2024 @ 5:19 am
And I once knew a Polish woman who spoke impeccable English with the British Received Pronunciation. When she first arrived in New York and asked for a bottle of water /ˈwɔːtə/, she just got puzzled looks. People only understood her when she asked for /ˈwɑɾɚ/.
Jerry Packard said,
August 23, 2024 @ 7:43 am
A lot of the tone variation between PRC and Taiwan Mandarin is the result of the lexicographers in the two places making different decisions on the pronunciation of the entering tone syllables in the 1940s and 50s. This is reflected in scores of pairs such as jian4zhu4-jian4zhu2 ‘architecture’, ji1mo4-ji2mo4 ‘lonely’, xing1qi1-xing1qi2 ‘week’, ji1du1jiao4-jidu2jiao4 ‘Christianity’, etc. These differences are codified in the dictionaries published in the 2 respective places.
M. Paul Shore said,
August 23, 2024 @ 10:07 am
John Rohsenow: The substituting of a final -ng for final -n when speaking English is very, very common among native speakers of Mandarin, a tendency that’s puzzled me for decades. (I like your ZYFH solution.) Why should there be any confusion, seeing as Mandarin itself makes a clear, phonemic distinction between -n and -ng? I’d be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on that question.
M. Paul Shore said,
August 23, 2024 @ 10:40 am
I’ll offer one possible answer to the question I’ve posed above, namely that perhaps the habitual confusion of English final -n and final -ng by native Mandarin speakers reveals that, to their linguistic brains, -n and -ng in Mandarin are the same phoneme, with the two distinct phonetic realizations of that phoneme being governed by the differences, however subtle, in the vowels that precede them.
If that hypothesis is correct, it follows that Pinyin incorporates an incorrect phonemic analysis of the -n/-ng minimal pairs in question, and that instead of making an explicit distinction between -n and -ng, it should be making distinctions between two different types of “a”, two different types of “e”, two different types of “i”, and two different types of “ia”.
Cirk R Bejnar said,
August 23, 2024 @ 5:54 pm
Classical Latin (older than the last common ancestor of all Romance languages) used none of these – its most common strategy seems to have been ita'st, "so [it] is".
Interesting. I have never seen the form ita'st written that way before. While elision was pretty standard across all registers while Classical Latin remained a spoken language, it is almost always unindicated in modern editions and I haven't seen it in most ancient documents, though I am by no means a true subject matter expert.
When I first took Latin in High School, we were taught to use ita vero "thus truely" as an equivalent for yes which works fine for agreement with an answer but not for agreeing to undertake actions in which case the verb should be repeated.
katarina said,
August 23, 2024 @ 6:57 pm
@ Jerry Packard and @ M. Paul Shore:
I am familiar only with confusion of -in and -ing, as well as -en and -eng in Mandarin among some Chinese speakers, which
can carry over when they speak English.
This confusion is present among native speakers of the Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan province topolects. I know this because my
parents come from one of those provinces and I have friends from those provinces as well.
Some of them will say _ying_ instead of _in_. So:
"I am going yingto New York today, I am ying a hurry."
I myself always said _renming_ instead of the correct renmin "people" in Mandarin. Said _yingwei_"because" instead of the correct _yinwei_ . Said _nen_ "cold" instead of the proper _leng_ "cold" in Mandarin. That was until I went to college and heard proper or Standard, Mandarin. The -ing and -eng are proper pronunciation in the above provinces but not in Standard Mandarin.
katarina said,
August 23, 2024 @ 7:15 pm
@ Victor Mair
Indeed, there is no all-purpose "yes" and "no" in Chinese.
If asked a question : "Is is cold today?", you answer "Cold" or
"Not cold," not with a "yes" or "no".
I like the description of this as a "choice question".
John Swindle said,
August 24, 2024 @ 1:44 am
To me the vowels in Mandarin "han" and "hang" sound the same, and the degree of difference between the final consonants seems to vary from speaker to speaker. Have I misheard this? Is there possibly some regional variation? And aren't the vowels in "xian" and "xiang" quite different from one another?
Philip Taylor said,
August 24, 2024 @ 3:59 am
As a relative beginner in spoken Mandarin, I would certainly agree that the final vowels in "xian" and "xiang" are noticeably different, with the first close to IPA /e/ and the second close to IPA /ʌ/.
M. Paul Shore said,
August 24, 2024 @ 4:10 am
John Swindle: It’s been my impression that the “a” of the han syllables is more of a front vowel and the “a” of the hang syllables is more of a back vowel, with the distinction between them being similar to the distinction between, say, patte and pâte in traditional Parisian French. I’d welcome other commenters’ opinions on that, though. As for the xian and xiang syllables, yes, their respective vowel sounds are unmistakably different, but the spelling does not reflect that; and as I argue above, perhaps some ideal spelling system would do so, with the phonetic difference between -n and -ng being concomitantly ignored.
John Swindle said,
August 24, 2024 @ 5:54 am
@M. Paul Shore: I think you’re onto something.
M. Ling 莫齡 said,
August 24, 2024 @ 6:12 am
I for one am very, very glad to find others who share my experience of being taught to say gōng for 共. I'm still somewhat puzzled by this whole thing. Would this be an issue of differing standardizations? Older dictionaries (I've checked 洪武正韻 and 康熙字典, Duan Yucai 段玉裁's commentary on the 說文解字, and the 1926 edition of the 老國音 dictionary 校改國音字典, all freely available online) seem to agree on the fact that 共 does have a Level tone pronunciation, so when did it "become" Departing? As far as I can tell this is a cross-strait phenomenon and Taiwanese dictionaries also prescribe the Departing reading for 共 in 共和國 and 共產黨.
Tom Dawkes said,
August 24, 2024 @ 3:46 pm
On Don Keyser's experience of finding 'si' and 'shi' were not differentiated by Taiwanese speakers: Cardiff (UK) is twinned with Xiamen (formerly Amoy), and Cardiff University has a Confucius Institute, which had at least in its early days Chinese tutors from Xiamen. I vividly recall when taking evening classes in the 1990s that our tutor seemed unable to make the s/x/sh distinctions consistently.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 25, 2024 @ 12:06 am
An OK working definition of "phonological segment" might be "the 'minimal' thing in a minimal contrast." So while in Mandarin k- and g- are segments because kan = gan except for this difference, it is harder to be sure that -n and -ŋ among many others are segments because the minimal difference between e.g. pen and peng is everything that follows the p-. Such situations are very typical in languages of this kind and partially explain the native tradition of analyzing in terms of onset+rime. A representation like M. Paul Shore is proposing would be fine but no more faithful to the phonology than the pinyin solution.
And I agree with katarina that -n/-ng mixup is not generally a thing in English (or Mandarin) for Chinese speakers…