Taiwanese phonetics

December 23, 2024 @ 7:28 pm · Filed by under Announcements, Books, Phonetics and phonology

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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):

Summary
 
Taiwanese, formerly the lingua franca of Taiwan and currently the second largest language on the island, is genealogically related to Min from the Sino-Tibetan family. Throughout history, it has been influenced by many languages, but only Mandarin has exerted heavy influences on its phonological system. This Element provides an overview of the sound inventory in mainstream Taiwanese, and details its major dialectal differences. In addition, the Element introduces speech materials that could be used for studying the phonetics of Taiwanese, including datasets from both read and spontaneous speech. Based on the data, this Element provides an analysis of Taiwanese phonetics, covering phenomena in consonants, vowels, tones, syllables, and prosody. Some of the results are in line with previous studies, while others imply potential new directions in which the language might be analyzed and might evolve. The Element ends with suggestions for future research lines for the phonetics of the language.

Excellent maps, tables, sound spectrograms, charts, graphs, figures, illustrations, and references.

Available free online.

Here is an example of their treatment of Taiwanese sentences and passages.

有一个囡仔叫做阿如。伊足溫柔，毋過字寫甲足䆀, ，所以伊的同學攏共伊笑。頂禮拜二，天氣足熱，阿如想欲入去教室，毋過伊同學共伊欺負，無愛予阿如入去。阿如心內足艱苦，所以轉去共媽媽講。媽媽就共伊講:「阿如，你著愛忍耐！」

Ū tsi̍t ê gín-á kiò-tsò A-jû. I tsiok un-jiû, m̄-koh jī siá kah tsiok bái, sóo-í i ê tông-o̍h lóng kā i tshiò. Tíng lé-pài-jī, thinn-khì tsiok jua̍h, A-jû siūnn-beh ji̍p-khì kàu-sik, m̄-koh i tông-o̍h kā i khi-hū, bô ài hōo A-jû–ji̍p-khì. A-jû sim-lāi tsiok kan-khóo, sóo-í tńg-khì kā ma-ma kóng. Ma-ma tō kā i kóng, “A-jû, lí tio̍h ài jím-nāi!”

There was a child named Aju. She was very sweet, but had poor handwriting, so her classmates all laughed at her. Last Tuesday, it was very hot, and Aju wanted to enter the classroom, but her classmates bullied her by not letting her in. Aju was in anguish, so she went home and told her mom. Mom then told her, “Aju, you just have to put up with it!”

About one-third of the book consists of an abstract, which the authors describe thus:

What follows are the transcripts of the Taiwanese recording excerpts from the Mandarin-Taiwanese Spontaneous Speech Corpus (Fon, Reference Fon2004) in both the standard character system and the romanization system of M3, M4, F3, and F4. English translation is also provided to facilitate understanding. Both of the female speakers co-switched to Mandarin several times in their excerpts. As Mandarin is the dominant and official language in Taiwan, this is a fairly common phenomenon. Mandarin utterances are indicated through underline, and its romanization follows the Hanyu pinyin system. To protect the speakers’ privacy, their names were edited out.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Wolfgang Behr]

December 23, 2024 @ 7:28 pm · Filed by under Announcements, Books, Phonetics and phonology


8 Comments

  1. Chris Button said,

    December 24, 2024 @ 7:17 am

    Etymologically is there more to the homophony of 个 and 的 as "ê", or is it just accidental convergence in sound?

  2. Philip Taylor said,

    December 24, 2024 @ 7:22 am

    Forgive my ignorance (or stupidity), Chris, but what sound are we intended to infer from e-circumflex ?

  3. David Marjanović said,

    December 24, 2024 @ 7:35 am

    Wikipedia says it's [e] in a rising tone more or less identical to the 2nd tone of Standard Mandarin.

  4. Philip Taylor said,

    December 24, 2024 @ 10:42 am

    Ah, I see — I was not previously familiar with Pe̍h-ōe-jī so failed to indentify the caret as a tone marker; my mind basically said "I know how to interpret e-circumflex in French, but have no idea how to interpret it in Taiwanese".

  5. Jonathan Smith said,

    December 27, 2024 @ 10:59 pm

    Re: what we might call attributive particle and unmarked classifier, they're homophonous or close in lots of southern Chinese languages including Hokkien, which is seen as significant in the etymological considerations out there. And as I keep reminding us, we really, really can't present written symbols like 个 and 的 as if they refer unambiguously to words of languages… the relevant items of Hokkien languages and e.g. Mandarin have zero to do with one another.

    Re: Tone 5 in Taiwanese etc., IMO it is "normatively" not much like Mandarin Tone 2, as it hangs out lower longer and "curves" upward… but native speakers of Taiwanese learned Mandarin as a second language (decades ago) then young native speakers of Mandarin "recovered" Taiwanese (ongoing), causing much phonetic closening and mergening of stuff including realizations of tones.

    Re: this study, there is fresh-ish good stuff and some less good stuff where the problem is echoing of conventional wisdom. A few that I noticed — (1) There is no such thing as the "sandhi circle"; this is a weird traditional descriptive (in)convenience that bears little/no relation to speakers' knowledge/intuitions or (as has been shown in detailed studies) to phonetic facts. (2) The cumbersome adjusted sandhi "rules" considered to apply to "diminutive" a2-suffixed words are unnecessary and make wrong predictions — there are only two totally predictable contours for such words in varieties I've heard (which should really be treated as complex contours across 2+ syllables.) (3) The high pronunciations of khi3 'go', kah4 'and', etc., in running speech are not due to "sandhi applying twice" — such a rule is way too broad for purpose and doesn't account for the fact that these changes, unlike "sandhi" generally, are highly sensitive to speech rate. (4) Invoking "stress" just to account for right-edge clitics like the compound directional particles doesn't make sense as this would mean only one word in every like 50 would feature "stress." Instead stress is word/phrase final across the board with exceptions in such cases (which incidentally seem to have changed considerably in modern Taiwanese relative to the historical situation.)

  6. Chris Button said,

    December 28, 2024 @ 11:29 pm

    Re: what we might call attributive particle and unmarked classifier, they're homophonous or close in lots of southern Chinese languages including Hokkien, which is seen as significant in the etymological considerations out there.

    Could you possibly share some links to pertinent studies?

  7. Jonathan Smith said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 10:12 pm

    Re: Hokkien sensu stricto, Douglas's Amoy dictionary (1899: 99) has at the entry for ê (he writes this = Chin-chew/Quanzhou gê) "sign of the genitive; final particle, forming adjectives out of nouns […]; a general classifier […]" i.e. this is treated as a single item which the author might be implying is deeply related to the classical/wenyan particle (?) (Mandarin "reflex") qi2 其. This has become a commonly invoked idea FWIW (not a lot?); IDK how seriously it has been taken up in scholarship. Others have pursued some relationship to the classifier whose Mandarin reflex is ge4 個~个; see e.g. remarks in Wiktionary under "Southern Min classifier and possessive particle" here. This (even dubiouser?) notion might I guess be related to the fact that the word(s) in question is/are written "个"/"兮" in kua-á-chheh-type literature.

    pertinent old LL comment
    <a href="https://taigi.page/posts/%E5%8F%B0%E8%AA%9E%E5%BD%A2%E5%AE%B9%E8%A9%9E%E8%A9%9E%E5%B0%BE%C3%AA%E5%AF%AB%E5%81%9A%E7%9A%84%E3%84%9F%E6%94%8F%E6%AF%8B%E5%A5%BD/"pertinent Taiwanese discussion

    Re: more generally, Norman (1988) and others note the "southern" "subordinative" particles featuring velar/null onsets in contrast to northern /ti/ and the like.

  8. Chris Button said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 10:52 am

    Thanks for the link to the great LLog post by Movenon.

    A relationship makes sense. I didn't think I would have been the first person to bring it up.

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