The phonotactics and graphic construction of "biang"

January 10, 2025 @ 7:41 am · Filed by under Language and food, Phonetics and phonology, Writing systems

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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)

Jin, the group of Sinitic lects to which Xi'an topolect belongs, employs extremely complex tone sandhi, or tone changes that occur when words are put together into phrases. The tone sandhi of Jin is notable in two ways among Chinese varieties:

    • Tone sandhi rules depend on the grammatical structure of the words being put together. Hence, an adjective–noun compound may go through different sets of changes compared to a verb–object compound.
    • There are Jin varieties in which the "dark level" tone category (yīnpíng 阴平) and "light level" (yángpíng 阳平) tone have merged in isolation but can still be distinguished in tone sandhi contexts. That is, while e.g. Standard Mandarin has a tonal distinction between Tone 1 and Tone 2, corresponding words in Jin Chinese may have the same tone when pronounced separately. However, these words can still be distinguished in connected speech. For example, in Pingyao Jin, dark level tou 偷 'secretly' and ting 听 'to listen' on the one hand, and light level tao 桃 'peach' and hong 红 'red' on the other hand, all have the same rising tone [˩˧] when pronounced in isolation. Yet, when these words are combined into touting 偷听 'eavesdropping' and taohong 桃红 'peach red', the tonal distinction emerges. In touting, tou has a falling tone [˧˩] and ting has a high-rising tone [˧˥], whereas both syllables in taohong still have the same low-rising tone [˩˧] as in isolation.
    • According to Guo (1989) and also noted by Sagart (1999), the departing (qusheng 去声) tone category in the Jin dialect of Xiaoyi is characterized by -ʰ and a high falling tone [˥˧]. Xiaoyi also lacks a voicing split in the level tone. The rising (shangsheng 上声) tone in Xiaoyi is also "characterized by a glottal break in the middle of the syllable [˧˩ʔ˩˨]".

(source)

Grammatical constructions and usages are also distinctively different from MSM.  Lexical diversity is noteworthy.

You can get a taste of what this all boils down to in reality by reading this post:  "Shaanxi topolect" (9/6/18), from which I quote the following passage:

Shaanxi speech (Shǎnxī huà 陝西話) is supposed to be a northwest "dialect" of Mandarin, but it is evident from this word list how widely it differs from Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) (Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 / Guóyǔ 國語 / Huáyǔ 華語).  I'll just mention a few of the nearly three dozen items on the list to give an idea of how different they are from MSM (note that many of the Shaanxi lexemes are pronounced with syllables that are impermissible in MSM and are written with special characters [cf. Cantonese]):

tóu 头 ("head") sá
měi 美 ("pretty") chàn
shà 啥 ("what") sā
xià 下 ("down; under; below") hā
ná 拿 ("take") qiā
shūfú 舒服 ("comfortable") chàn
zhànzhù 站住 ("stop; stand still") nǒu
huájī 滑稽 ("funny; humorous") guāng sóng
tiào 跳 ("jump") biè
chīfàn 吃饭 ("eat") diè
fèngcì 讽刺 ("satirize") hài sào
huàidàn 坏蛋 ("scoundrel") hā sóng

A much longer list of Shaanxi expressions may be found here.  Note that many Shaanxi usages go back a thousand or two thousand years ago.  The capital of Shaanxi Province, Xi'an, was a historically very important city that lay at the eastern end of the so-called Silk Road (the transcontinental trade routes that already existed long before silk was traded along them) and just south of the Ordos, which was a vital zone of interaction between the steppe and the sown.

To demonstrate how complex the topolectal mysteries swirling around biang are, let us just focus briefly on one of the words on the list above, the first:  tóu 头 ("head") sá.  Here's what I had to say about it in another post, "A Persian word in a Sinitic topolect" (3/10/20):

Yesterday afternoon at Indiana University I gave a wide-ranging lecture on Iranian and Chinese interconnections from the Bronze Age through the late imperial period.  After the lecture, Chen Su, a doctoral candidate in Central Eurasian Studies, approached me and said that some of the points I made helped her to realize something about her own speech that had confused her for years.

Chen Su, who hails from Xi'an, where Guanzhong topolect is spoken, had noticed an interesting coincidence in the similarity of the pronunciation between Persian and Guanzhong topolect for the word “head”.

On the one hand, we have Persian sar سر （it's the same in Middle Persian).

The corresponding Guanzhong topolectal word is sá.

The usual Mandarin words for "head" are tóu 頭 and shǒu 首.

What I find most revealing is that there is no exact character for this oral term in Guanzhong topolect (ditto for Cantonese, Taiwanese, and virtually all other Sinitic topolects).  According to Chen Su, even in modern Chinese dictionaries there is no parallel character that has the same pronunciation as this topolectal word for "head".

The other day, in "Crisps and chips" (1/6/25), I stated that I don't like Pringles chips in a canister because they're not real.  That prompted MattF to make this remark:  "Pringles bring to mind the great SF author Gene Wolfe, whose early career as an engineer included work on Pringle manufacturing. He would allude to Pringles as ‘the only snack food with negative curvature’." 

A Pringles crisp has the mathematical shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid.  What self-respecting potato chip would allow itself to look like a hyperbolic paraboloid?

"Biang" is also kind of like a Buddho-Daoist tessera or talisman, for which see "Ad hoc sinographic romanization in Indonesia" (12/17/24), "Weird characters" (7/7/13), and "Unknown language #9" (5/6/17).

As a sinograph, biáng is about as genuine as a Pringles stackable potato snack is as a potato chip.  The latter is extruded from a specially designed food processing machine, the former is extruded from a character making device.  It is not a naturally evolved sinograph.  As such it can not be analyzed in terms of traditional Chinese character phonology and morphology.

If biáng is not a genuinely evolved character (like those in the traditional rime tables / books) and its shape cannot be explained in terms of the lexicographical system that grew out of the Shuōwén jiězì 說文解字 (Explaining graphs and analyzing characters [c. 100 AD]), what then is it?

I think biáng is a Zhuang Zian jest against the entire sinographic writing system, which attempts to establish lographically distinct units for its morphemes, while all around it are bubbling up infinitely irrepressible vocal expressions of meanings and emotions.  "Biang" is one such exclamation.  It is the onomatopoeic attempt of the people living in and around Xi'an to capture the sound of slapping the long, flat noodles on the kneading board upon which they are drawn out from lumps of dough.  If you try to confine that sound within the MSM phonologically permissible chart of sounds, you might have to resort to phonetic substitutes such as biāo 彪 ("streak, stripe, vein; tiger cat") or bīng 冰 ("ice").  People who have actually heard the onomatopoeic expression as spoken by Xi'an locals emphasize its nasal quality.

The last laugh is on the people who take seriously and try to memorize how to write it.  But it's not much of a joke when a teacher punishes a poor student and makes him / her write it a hundred times or more.  No fun.

 

Afterword

Everything that I say about biang in this post is to be supplemented by what I said about it in previous posts.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Zhang He and Yijie Zhang]

January 10, 2025 @ 7:41 am · Filed by under Language and food, Phonetics and phonology, Writing systems


18 Comments »

  1. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    January 10, 2025 @ 9:18 am

    Prof. Mair,

    At the point where the poor Guanzhong lady can't even write the word for "head" in her own language using the "official" Chinese writing system, I began to realize why your advocacy for pinyin has been so strident — the 58-stroke biang character is not a glorious triumph of ideography; it's a cry for help!

    I don't get it. Two things were invented about 5,000-8,000 years ago: phonetic writing, and irrigation. But imagine this conversation between two Samarrans:

    S1: Whatcha digging there, Sam?

    S2: Oh, hi, Aaron! It's a thing I call "irrigation". I tried it last year, and I find it helps to grow crops, maintain landscapes, and revegetate disturbed soils in dry areas and during times of below-average rainfall. In addition to these uses, I also use it to protect crops from frost, suppress weed growth in grain fields, and prevent soil consolidation. It cools my livestock, reduces dust, disposes of sewage, and supports my mining operations.

    S1: Well, ain't that something! Next thing you know, people will be tying animals to their plows! Me, I just live by the river and hope the rain falls and the floods come. It's a lot of work, and I can't live anywhere _except_ by the river, and I've lost a lot of friends and family to famine, but why break with tradition, ya know?

    Also, your "Afterword" reminded me of the ossified language lawyers use for when you don't want to keep repeating yourself for each Count in your pleading, e.g., "118. Plaintiff incorporates by reference the averments of Paragraphs 1 through 117 above as though set forth fully herein."

  2. Andreas Johansson said,

    January 10, 2025 @ 9:35 am

    The WP article transcribes -iang as [iɑŋ], i.e. as (presumably) diphthong plus nasal stop, not as a triphthong. What's up?

  3. Rodger C said,

    January 10, 2025 @ 1:05 pm

    [ŋ] isn't a stop, it's a continuant.

  4. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 10, 2025 @ 2:23 pm

    * OP used "triphthong" wrong
    * "nasal stop" is correct/normal, though here "stop" is broader than "plosive". "nasals" involve closure of vocal tract and are not "continuants" right? Here also use of the terminology may vary…
    * as OP notes, character for biang2 is for fun. Logographic writing is going strong, alphabetic writing should not be characterized as a technological advance.

  5. Jerry Packard said,

    January 11, 2025 @ 11:50 am

    To my mind, 'biang' is not a phonotactic violation, but rather a 'random gap' in the Mandarin phonological system. The Mandarin -iang final does have a restricted distribution, because it may only occur after (using pinyin for convenience) [n-], [l-], [j-], [q-], [x-] or zero [yang]. This would be like the syllable *[tiu], which is a random gap because Mandarin allows e.g., [diu], [qiu], [liu], [niu] etc., as compared with *[kiu], which is phonotactically disallowed because Mandarin does not allow a velar to be followed by a high front vowel like [i]. Compare English *skrep vs. *vkon, where both are bad but *vkon is a phonotactic violation because it disallows *vk, but *skrep is a random gap because it allows *sk.

  6. Philip Taylor said,

    January 11, 2025 @ 2:34 pm

    Although "skrep" may itself be unattested in English, I can certainly imagine a speaker of high-RP appearing to say "Well, Labour just screpped through this time, but I can't imagine them remaining in power for long …"

  7. Chris Button said,

    January 11, 2025 @ 4:09 pm

    @ Jerry Packard

    To my mind, 'biang' is not a phonotactic violation, but rather a 'random gap' in the Mandarin phonological system.

    The reason I called it a phonotactic constraint is because you cannot derive biáng regularly from earlier stages of Chinese. Neither the rhyme "-iang" nor the tone can combine with the "b-" onset.

    So I don't think we can call it a "random" gap because it is an "expected" gap.

    Still, it remains a gap of sorts since it is certainly easily pronounceable for a Mandarin speaker. Does that then disqualify it from being a phonotactic constraint? I don't think so, but I suppose it depends on your definition of phonotactic constraint.

  8. Jerry Packard said,

    January 11, 2025 @ 9:02 pm

    Chris, what do you mean the tone can’t occur with the b- onset? The lexicon is filled with b- onsets with all 4 tones.

  9. Victor Mair said,

    January 11, 2025 @ 11:45 pm

    From Jinyi Cai:

    To me, the character almost looks like a picture/image that's being sticked on the wall (like Chinese new year woodcut picture 年画). The composition of the character is also interesting. There is the character parts "马 horse", 长 long/length, 心 heart. It's almost telling a story of a traveller riding on a horse, stopping at a restaurant/canteen, sitting down at the table, eating some delicious long noodles, and feeling happy (开心).

  10. Chris Button said,

    January 12, 2025 @ 12:01 am

    @ Jerry Packard

    I'm saying it based on the conditioning environments for the split of ping-sheng into tones 1 and 2.

    To have tone 2 in a syllable of this type, wouldn't the onset need to be "p" rather than "b"? If "b", then wouldn't it take tone 1?

  11. Jerry Packard said,

    January 12, 2025 @ 10:02 am

    @Chris Button
    I think it goes back to your comment on how phonotactics is defined. Your definition seems to include historical derivation of syllable types, while the standard definition (if I may) views the system as it exists now, and does not include information from historical derivation.

  12. Chris Button said,

    January 12, 2025 @ 11:12 am

    It's actually making quite a bold statement.

    Its pronunciation and accompanying written form seem plausible, but both are gross violations of what could ever have reasonably evolved naturally.

  13. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    January 12, 2025 @ 5:44 pm

    Jerry, I note a certain diskrepancy…

  14. Jerry Packard said,

    January 13, 2025 @ 12:37 pm

    @Benjamin
    Well yes, this is indeed the first I’ve heard of the (albeit innovative) inclusion of historical data input to phonotactics, but to me the correct pronunciation of the character is a moot point anyway, because the pronunciation of the character follows the spoken word, which in Mandarin is unambiguously biang2, and BTW it should come as no surprise that I do agree with Jonathan that logographic writing has merit and alphabetic writing shouldn’t be lionized as a technological advance.

  15. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    January 13, 2025 @ 2:45 pm

    Jerry,

    Oh, I only meant to say that /skrep/ (e.g. "di-SCREP-an-cy") _is_ a felicitous phonetic phenomenon in spoken English, and not a gap that need be filled.

    As for logographic writing having merit — of course it does; for example, in visual arts, poetry, fiction, what have you. But as a preferred means of efficiently and effectively conveying semantic information, I'm not convinced. And the fact that it's used by the PRC to discourage the use of "other" Chineses and transcribing non-Chinese minority languages may be, for some, a sufficient reason alone to jump on the pinyin bandwagon.

  16. Jerry Packard said,

    January 14, 2025 @ 7:20 am

    Benjamin,

    Oh I see. Good get (although your SCREP is at least ambisyllabic). So I’d have to find a better example of a possible but non-occurring syllable.

    I’m all in favor of pinyin, phoneticization and alphabetization, but do feel the Chinese writing system should be appreciated for the remarkable entity that it is.

  17. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 15, 2025 @ 7:56 pm

    I suspect biang2 is just as much a phonotactic irregularity in Guanzhong Mandarin as it is in standard Chinese — it's probably ideophonic~onomatopoeic — but can't easily find a clear statement… as for "gap", Mand. (Pinyin) b- + yangping/2nd tone per se can't at this stage be called irregular as "entering tone" words also came here (bi2 nose, ba2 uproot etc.)… though with nasal coda yes it's weird. Plus none of b-/p-/m-/w- go with (pinyin) -iang… so this gets a bit bigger than sheer accidental gap; "miang" etc. will strike people as weird (though OK PY -ing often "surfaces" rather close to this…)

  18. Jonathan Smith said,

    January 15, 2025 @ 8:07 pm

    Re: alphabetic writing representing a literal (ha) technological advancement, this is a weird presentist/Westernist meem from the 80s or sometime — Chinese of the Song dynasty were I'm sure equally convinced that the relatively advanced state of their civilization was inextricably linked to the Chinese writing system and its logic-n-genius. Given the state of hitek in China and Japan, clinging to this idea feels even sillier now than it did (or should have) back in the day…

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