Distinguishing between \"four\" and \"ten\" in rapid, slurred Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is not always easy:\u00a0 s\u00ec \u56db vs. sh\u00ed \u5341.\u00a0 Try saying s\u00ecsh\u00eds\u00ec \u56db\u5341\u56db (\"forty-four\") quickly and it starts to feel like the beginning of a tongue twister.\u00a0 Now, when speakers from the various topolects, even within the so-called Mandarin group, come together and tones, vowels, and consonants start flying off in all directions, things can become still hairier and sometimes even costly.<\/p>\n
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Much to his chagrin, a supermarket manager from the southeastern province of Guangdong<\/a> working in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing<\/a> found this out the hard way.<\/p>\n … Tan Jiayue, the owner of a supermarket in the huge southwest Chinese metropolis, called a printing house to make coupons for imported lobsters that were going on sale, the Chongqing Commercial Daily<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n Tan, from coastal Guangdong province, said he wanted to sell four lobsters for 328 yuan, and the owner of the printery thought he meant 10.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know how much a lobster should cost. His Mandarin had a heavy accent. I carefully confirmed the quantity with him and asked if he meant 10, and he said \u2018yes\u2019,\u201d the printery owner told the newspaper.<\/p>\n Tan, in turn, thought his counterpart said \u201cfour\u201d instead of \u201cten\u201d.<\/p>\n In the Chongqing dialect, \u201cfour\u201d and \u201cten\u201d are pronounced almost the same except their slightly differed tones \u2013 a delicate difference that many outsiders find difficult to distinguish.<\/p>\n The coupons were printed with \u201c328 yuan for 10 lobsters\u201d and were sold at the supermarket. The mistake was not found out because there were thousands of coupons for all kinds of products arriving on the same day, and the supermarket only ran a spot check on them, the report said.<\/p>\n Tan only discovered the mistake while he was doing the rounds at the supermarket the next day, by while time nearly 30 coupons had been sold.<\/p>\n The lobsters, imported from Boston in the United States, usually sell for 98 yuan each in the supermarket, and selling four for 328 yuan already left him very little profit, Tan said.<\/p>\n Selling ten for 328 had cost him more than 10,000 yuan, he added…..<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n From:\u00a0 \"Lost in translation: The difference between \u2018four\u2019 and \u2018ten\u2019 is more than 10,000 yuan for Chinese supermarket manager<\/a>\" (SCMP, 1\/15\/17)<\/p>\n VHM:\u00a0 The title of the article is grossly misleading.\u00a0 This has nothing to do with translation.<\/p>\n Transacting prices over the telephone like this, Tan was just asking for trouble.\u00a0 But I don't think it was a matter of his Cantonese (if he indeed speaks that language) clashing with Chongqing patois.\u00a0 Cantonese would be sei3 \u56db and sap6 \u56db.\u00a0 Those are too far away from MSM s\u00ec \u56db and sh\u00ed \u5341 and their Chongqing variants (discussed below) to cause a problem of misrecognition.\u00a0 The Guangdong supermarket manager was probably trying to speak MSM, and either he did it relatively well or he may have spoken it with a Cantonese accent.<\/p>\n The problem is with the pronunciation of \u56db and \u5341 in Chongqing topolect.\u00a0 To tell the truth, I don't know exactly what it is, but — so far as I can recall from my memory of visits there about 15-20 years ago — it is similar to Chengdu topolect, both belonging to southwest Mandarin.<\/p>\n According to Tom Bishop, commenting on the Chongqing pronunciation of \u56db and \u5341,<\/p>\n Aside from the tone they're identical and resemble \"si\" in Putonghua. I think the tones are low falling for \u5341 (\u967d\u5e73, 2nd tone, which includes old \u5165\u8072), and rising for \u56db (\u53bb\u8072, 4th tone). I could be wrong.<\/p>\n Brendan O'Kane has this to say about the Chengdu pronunciation of \u56db and \u5341:<\/p>\n Not familiar with Chongqing vernacular, but I remember hilarious confusion involving Chengdu speakers pronouncing \u56db\u5341 as\u00a0s\u00eds\u00ec when I visited in January 2005.<\/p>\n Compare that with s\u00ecsh\u00ed \u56db\u5341 (\"forty\") of MSM.<\/p>\n I discussed Sichuanese pronunciation in this comment <\/a>from the following post, \"The enigmatic language of the new Windows 8 ads<\/a>\" (5\/14\/13):<\/p>\n If you are a speaker of MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin) and you travel across the Mandarin-speaking areas of China, you will be astonished at the enormous variety of tonal configurations for words. My wife was from Shandong and grew up in Sichuan, so I got a liberal dose of the tonal patterns of both areas. I became so conditioned to them that, if I were upstairs and someone called who spoke Mandarin with Sichuan or Shandong tones, I could tell very quickly to which my wife downstairs was speaking, since \u2014 even though she spoke beautiful MSM \u2014 she would switch into the very different tone patterns of her interlocutor. I often said that Sichuanese tones were \"upside down\" in relation to MSM (though they are consistent within their own phonological system).<\/p>\n