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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

• "Annals of Biang, Vienna edition" (1/3/25)
• "Annals of biang"  (6/5/23) — Budapest edition
• "Biangbiang: authentic Xi'an grub in the heart of Philadelphia's University City" (6/9/22)
• "Murgers and biangbiang in London" (8/17/19)
• "Shaanxi topolect" (9/6/18)
• "Stroke order" (10/30/18)
• "Grids galore" (11/19/23)
• "Writing Chinese characters as a form of punishment" (11/1/15)
• "Complex 'character test' facing tardy Chinese students" (BBC, 10/29/15)
• Wikipedia article
• "A Chinese character that is harder to write than 'biang'" (7/30/20) — includes remarks about the essential squareness of Chinese writing
• "Rectilinear rectitude" (11/6/23)
• "The Awful Chinese Writing System" (Geoff Pullum, Lingua Franca, 1/20/16)
• "Starve Bird" (12/29/22)
• "Peace and Harmony" (10/16/10) — the most "Chinese" Chinese character
• "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (9/9/20) — with a humongous bibliography, a couple of entries featuring "biang"
• "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25)
• "A Persian word in a Sinitic topolect" (3/10/20)

[Thanks to Zhang He and Yijie Zhang]

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

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