The Chinese alphabet

[Alex_Dubinsky]

I am currently a student of Mandarin, and I found this to be an interesting question:

Chinese, of course, is not normally written phonetically. However, since the communists came to power, they standardized on the pinyin system of transcribing their language using roman characters (the characters took up new sounds, however). My question is, how was this really possible? Did their language naturally divide into 20 or so sounds, or was there some square-peg-in-round-hole action? Even in Englsh, which coexisted with phonetic spelling all its life, there's tons of sounds that don't really fit into our alphabet at all. This is especially relevant to me, as I try to nail my pronounciation.

[China Guy]

I am currently a student of Mandarin, and I found this to be an interesting question:

Chinese, of course, is not normally written phonetically. However, since the communists came to power, they standardized on the pinyin system of transcribing their language using roman characters (the characters took up new sounds, however). My question is, how was this really possible? Did their language naturally divide into 20 or so sounds, or was there some square-peg-in-round-hole action? Even in Englsh, which coexisted with phonetic spelling all its life, there's tons of sounds that don't really fit into our alphabet at all. This is especially relevant to me, as I try to nail my pronounciation.There have been a variety of romanization systems. Wage-Giles, which was developed by liguists, but most people don't understand the aspiration mark (ending up with nanking versus nanjing). The Yale system, which to an american is probably the closest intuitive pronounciation. And a bunch of others.

The thing to remember about pinyin is that the letters and syllable sounds are an approximation or representation of the Chinese pronunciation. X has no relation to the english sound. X is used to represent a Chinese sound. If you learn that X is pronounced with your mouth shape in a broad tight smile and tounge placed on the bottom of your mouth with a soft aspiration, then you should be at least ballpark (as opposed to trying to pronounce X with some preconcieved English alphabet baggage). You'll also figure out that the C sound is pronounced like X except the tounge is on the roof of the mouth behind the teeth with a hard aspiration. S on the other hand is a soft aspiration and the mouth is relaxed (not pulled back into that wide narrow smile).

xi, ci, shi, si all have nothing really to do with the English pronunciation but everything to do with various mouth shapes, aspiration and tounge placement.

chinese actually does have phonetic characters. from those phonetic characters came a system called Zhuyinfuhao (bopomofo), which was used widely in Taiwan. I believe Taiwan has switched over to a close but not quite the same mainland pinyin system.

chinese does have a set of sounds. I dont remember how many. Pinyin again represents/approximates those sounds.

there's tons of sounds that don't really fit into our alphabet at all. again, this is the key to learning pinyin. Pinyin represents a Chinese sound and not an English sound. Forget how the sound should be pronounced in English, and drill drill drill on how they sound in Chinese. 3-6 months and it will become natural. Given the amount of dictionary work you'll do, after a year or two you'll be much faster and more accurate at pinyin that 99% of native Chinese speakers.

Understand the phonetics of Chinese sounds. What is the mouth shape, soft or hard aspiration, where is the tounge placed, etc.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

No, I know pinyin has as much to do with English as any other language that uses the same symbols. The thought that I had was if a language that didn't write itself phonetically would evolve to be a zoo of sounds. Then, while writing this, I realized English itself is a zoo of sounds.

But anyway, I thought this was an interesting thing to think about. And it's of practical concern for me to know whether pinyin + tone marks really do represent all there is to know about chinese pronunciation, or if there's nuances, exceptions, etc that don't get transcribed.

Edit: I just realized I already knew some. E.g., the "er" sound that gets added to some words sometimes (like shi, 'is'). Maybe the "official" clean Mandarin is transcibed perfectly, and it was, like I said, a purging of square pegs?

[Wendell Wagner]

Alex_Dubinsky writes:

> Did their language naturally divide into 20 or so sounds, or was there some
> square-peg-in-round-hole action?

Of course their language always naturally divided up their utterances into several dozen sounds. They're called phonemes. All languages break up their utterances into phonemes. The phonemes used differ between different languages, but all languages use a finite (and rather small) set of phonemes. They might differ slightly between various dialects of a single language, but each dialect has its own fixed set of phonemes. The fact that a language has been written in a non-phonemic script (like Chinese characters) doesn't mean that it lacks phonemes. You might want to get an introductory text on linguistics and learn about such things.

[John Mace]

Even in Englsh, which coexisted with phonetic spelling all its life, there's tons of sounds that don't really fit into our alphabet at all.
Just for the record, English wasn't a written language "all its life".

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Of course their language always naturally divided up their utterances into several dozen sounds. They're called phonemes. All languages break up their utterances into phonemes. The phonemes used differ between different languages, but all languages use a finite (and rather small) set of phonemes. They might differ slightly between various dialects of a single language, but each dialect has its own fixed set of phonemes. The fact that a language has been written in a non-phonemic script (like Chinese characters) doesn't mean that it lacks phonemes. You might want to get an introductory text on linguistics and learn about such things.I know what phenomes are. And English has 40+, twice as many as it has letters. And no one can even say exactly how many there are.

Maybe it's that English literacy actually wasn't so hot most of its life that caused it to end up like this? (but there's gotta always have been letters to the words, no?)

[Dr. Drake]

I know what phenomes are. And English has 40+, twice as many as it has letters. And no one can even say exactly how many there are.

Maybe it's that English literacy actually wasn't so hot most of its life that caused it to end up like this? (but there's gotta always have been letters to the words, no?)Languages change over time. Modern English spelling is actually a pretty good indicator of late Middle English pronunciation: knight, for example, hasn't always had a silent [k] or silent [gh]. And what do you mean "no one can even say exactly how many there are?" Of course they can, it's just that different dialects have different sounds. I do not distinguish between the vowels in "caught" and "cot," but the British (and lots of Americans) do, therefore I have one fewer phoneme, but any competent linguist could sit me down for an hour or so and take a phonetic inventory, assign each one a symbol, and present me with a fully phonetic alphabet. In a thousand years, my linguistic heirs would be complaining about how complex and illogical the once-perfect system was.

[Mangosteen]

This is exactly why you should stay away from any pronunciation system that uses "English" letters when studying Mandarin. One cannot help trying to pronounce the letters you see in a Wade-Giles (or similar) system as you would pronounce them in English.

The Zhuyinfuhao system uses symbols for each of the many different sounds in Mandarin. You learn a particular symbol represents a sound in Mandarin. There is no confusion; you learn to think in Mandarin.

[China Guy]

The Zhuyinfuhao system uses symbols for each of the many different sounds in Mandarin. You learn a particular symbol represents a sound in Mandarin. There is no confusion; you learn to think in Mandarin.IMHO Zhuyinfuhao blows monkey chow. YMMV. And it sucks in the computer age. And even Taiwan is now using their own version of pinyin instead in schools.

"er" sound is for the northern/beijing accent. It's not part of broadcast Mandarin, if that's what you want to define as standard Mandarin. Not sure about now, but the "er" used to be inside of () to indicate it was optional/Beijing hua(er).

And it's of practical concern for me to know whether pinyin + tone marks really do represent all there is to know about chinese pronunciation, or if there's nuances, exceptions, etc that don't get transcribed.Of course there are nuances, and many of those are related to dialects and not broadcast or standard Mandarin. I can't think of exceptions off the top of my head. I remember finding out "nang" was a word and thinking that was wierd.

the only thing that makes Chinese a doable language is because it is so logical, no verb tenses, grammar is simple, etc.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

I agree, the pinyin does confuse me more than it helps. On a semi-related note, I hate it how pinyin is used to write Chinese names in English. It's like the Chinese are asking for Americans to horribly butcher their words. Sure, "paris" sounds fine vs "paree," but I dunno if that's the path you really want to take.

Anyway, China Guy, it sounds like you're saying Mandarin is also a second language for you. Care to share your experience?

And speaking of things I've found weird: learning that nigga (my transliteration) is used every other word in conversation. Also this girl called me a nigga jew, which means 'this little piggy' or something (which I can't say I liked either, but she swore it meant something cute).

[China Guy]

And speaking of things I've found weird: learning that nigga (my transliteration) is used every other word in conversation. Also this girl called me a nigga jew, which means 'this little piggy' or something (which I can't say I liked either, but she swore it meant something cute).nigga should be na ge. It means "that one". Zhe ge means "this one." That little piggy would be na zhi zhu.

The above should highlight that if you really want to learn Chinese. First, forget that pinyin has any relation to the English sound. Work very diligently to differentiate the actual sounds in Mandarin. Many sounds (further complicated by tones) are very similar. As I wrote earlier, it will really help instead of guessing and relying on your own phonetic sounds like nigga, to master pinyin. You won't really get anywhere until you master pinyin and standard corresponding characters for those basic sounds.

Using your own transliteration pretty much guarantees you won't make progress beyond a few words and phrases.

I took 4 years of Mandarin at UC Davis (pinyin. simplified characters, horrible mainland books, then long form characters and short stories), with a year off in the middle to study in Taiwan (learned zhuyinfuhao and never used it because it's not really practical). Lived in Taiwan, HK and China for 20+ years. also speak basic Japanese.

[China Guy]

This site might be helpful for you to show the pinyin and equivalent american sounds: http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/

[Alex_Dubinsky]

omg, for the nth time, I know pinyin! I was making a joke

Anyway, I've spent nearly a year living in Shanghai working with my professor. Pretty much everyone there spoke english, however, so I didn't get to learn too much chinese. But I did manage to pick up some, of course, and am now trying to keep studying it on my own. I'm trying to use several tools at once, but at the moment I'm going through the pimsleur tapes. My goal is to start being able to understand chinese tv and switch to that. I noticed that the best English speakers over there were the ones who watched English tv and movies [without chinese subtitles].

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Oh, and maybe you can help me. I used to have a link to all the PRC elementary school readers. When I started learning, I even managed to get through the whole first year first semester with just a dictionary. I think it was a little early to start doing that, but even so I learned quite a bit of vocabulary and characters. That was a while ago, and I'd really like to come back to it. I'm more ready for it, and it's a good complement to the audio-only pimsleur. Trouble is, the site was chinese and I can't seem to find it through english google.

[China Guy]

omg, for the nth time, I know pinyin! I was making a joke.Next time you should probably open such a joke thread in a different forum. Some people might actually think you're posing serious questions. It might start an urban rumor that Chinese go around saying nigga all the time. To clarify for readers that don't understand Chinese, Chinese people don't go around saying nigga. That sound is "na ge" (means "that"), which is kinda close if you're looking for a connection. Alex I guess was exaggerating out of context for comic effect.

It is true that the American pronunciation of "Jew" ironically corresponds to the Chinese pronunciation of "pig" (or zhu in pinyin). Linguistic coincidence and all that. However, there is no possible linguistic coincidence in Chinese that corresponds to "nigga Jew" as the Chinese sounds would be "na zhi zhu." Just wanted to be clear on that since this is GQ.

[Koxinga]

IMHO Zhuyinfuhao blows monkey chow. YMMV. And it sucks in the computer age. And even Taiwan is now using their own version of pinyin instead in schools.

Funny, as a foreigner living in Taiwan, I've always used Zhuyin Fuhao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zh%C3%B9y%C4%ABn_f%C3%BAh%C3%A0o), many of my friends are schoolteachers here and use it all the time to teach elementary school kids Chinese (never even heard of a "pinyin" beng taught), and everyone in my office uses it as the preferred input system when typing Chinese on their computers. I use it to type myself, though painstakingly--but some ladies in the office can type Chinese faster than I can type English.

FWIW I agree with Mangosteen that a Chinese-based phonetic system is vastly superior to a jury-rigged romanization system for foreign learners.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Numerical classifiers! Oh my! :)

[Alex_Dubinsky]

"That sound is 'na ge'". But you just wrote that in pinyin, so how is someone supposed to know how to say it? "nigga" is definately the way it sounds (well, depending on speaker), although the stress is on the second syllable not first. Anyway, chinese people do go around saying "nigga" all the time, and I found it pretty damn funny because you can go halfway round the world, and some things never change :D.

Anyway, looking at the zhuyin fuhao page it says there are 37 symbols total. This exactly goes back to my OP. Pinyin has nearly half as many symbols; that is a huge discrepancy! What is pinyin missing, and will it affect my learning chinese?

[Alex_Dubinsky]

p.s. 'nigga' doesn't just mean 'that.' It's a filler word (like the word 'like' for teenage girls). So it gets inserted everywhere in informal speech.

[Dr. Drake]

Anyway, looking at the zhuyin fuhao page it says there are 37 symbols total. This exactly goes back to my OP. Pinyin has nearly half as many symbols; that is a huge discrepancy! What is pinyin missing, and will it affect my learning chinese?It depends how you are counting. In Pinyin, you have c, ch, z, zh, s, and sh. Are you counting these as four symbols (c, h, s, z) or six? I guess I really still don't understand the complaint in the OP.

Chinese has different sounds than English. So what? The Roman alphabet is made up of arbitrary symbols. There is nothing about the combination of three lines in [z] that makes it go zzzzzzzzzzzzz. It can be used for anything. Languages that adopt the Roman alphabet generally go with some permutation of the original phonetic value, but they don't have to. Just by taking [h] out of the system and combining it with the remaining 25 letters (so: a, ah, b, bh, etc.) you have 50 different symbols, which is more than enough sounds for most languages.

Re: Chinese: Wikipedia's page lists 25 consonants and about 10 vowels. That's considerably more than 20 sounds, even without considering the tones. So the Roman alphabet will have to be bent a little for it to work. As far as I can tell, Pinyin consonental values are pretty straightforward and the vowels were designed by sadistic space mutants. But you can certainly learn the system and be able to pronounce a Chinese word correctly from its Pinyin equivalent; why would you think otherwise? Do you think there are secret sounds not represented in Pinyin that only Chinese people have access to?

[robardin]

Funny, as a foreigner living in Taiwan, I've always used Zhuyin Fuhao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zh%C3%B9y%C4%ABn_f%C3%BAh%C3%A0o), many of my friends are schoolteachers here and use it all the time to teach elementary school kids Chinese (never even heard of a "pinyin" beng taught)...
As an ABC, I was taught Chinese characters using the "bopomofo" phonetics, probably because our local Chinese community in NYC came mostly from Taiwan raised families (though most of those "Taiwan" people were really Mainlanders who'd fled to Taiwan after WW2, such as my own parents).

After finishing with Saturday Chinese language classes when I was 16 I didn't think about them again until some time in the mid-late 1990s, when it suddenly became a fad to wear baseball caps with bopomofo symbols on them sounding out the English pronunciation of the first letter of the team's name.

I remember thinking WTF??? to myself the first time I saw what I eventually figured out was a Yankees hat on a guy in the subway, where the front of the hat phonetically sounded out as "wye", which in the absence of any tonal marker by default means the first tone, which therefore means "bent" or "crooked" in Mandarin.

Since I'm a Mets fan I found this very funny, that all these ultra-hip Yankee fans were going around announcing they were "bent" or "crooked". Huh-huh... Huh.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

To answer my own question, having done more research (but with the help of leads from posters), there are tons of sounds not "simply" represented in pinyin but which show up as various combinations/formations of letters (some combinations are simple, some, especially concerning vowels, are not). I guess this all still counts as "pinyin," but it is a whole higher level that my introductory materials seemed to completely ignore and not even mention.

Still, I have a feeling that there are some rarer sounds that don't typically get included even in pronunciation guides. Like I said, English has em (particularly with foreign words like fiance). I guess I also wanted to learn more about what it's like for a language to transition to being written phonetically and how phoneticism affects it. Whether non-phonetic languages are "wilder" in terms of sounds, because maybe in the act of teaching phonetics you simplify (eg my introductory books on chinese). But oh well, I guess no one's in a mood to philosophize linguistically.

My plan is not to dwell too much trying to figure pinyin out in all its details, but just continue trying to learn mandaring with the ear (using tapes and tv programs*) and with the eye (reading characters). Trying to figure out mandarin sounds or trying to prounce them correctly seems pointless until my ear learns them first. (And no, I think listening to one guy on a tape is not how you learn the subtle sound patterns to a language. hence the big importance of tv).

*pplive is a godsend in that regard, as is bittorrent.

[China Guy]

Alex, let's try this a last time. With all due respect, you don't understand pinyin very well or this thread would not exist. You just might want to try out that link I provided earler.

Second, please stop the nigga already. It wasn't funny the first time. In Chinese the sounds are as follows:
pinyin = na and the American equivalent is naw (rhymes with raw) or nah (as in, a slang form of no)

pinyin = ge and the American equivalent is Gus (without the s)

some chinese will say pinyin = nei (for the na character), and the american equivalent is the first sound in neighbor

Not sure about other Chinese speaking dopers, but I really can't think of sounds that fall out of the standard with the exception of dialects and people that speak mandarin with a heavy accent.

I would say that zhuyinfuhao would have made sense if used like the Japanese katakana system. But it doesn't. I think it's from really old legacy software that you have people who are pretty fast with bopomofo. pinyin has the advantage that it is easy and fast with no special keyboard training required, and works on any western language keyboard. Lots of programs such as dictionaries can be accessed using a western keyboard instead of a specialized taiwanese one. For that matter, pinyin has the advantage that it's in roman script as opposed to a character system that only 20 million people in the world understand. Taiwan also uses a romanization system (think street signs), so have 2 systems in place to help on characters. I think a lot of the criticism of pinyin is from native english speakers, who expect a global system for romanizing Chinese to be based on American English.

Maybe zhuyinfuhao is "better" for non native speakers learning Chinese pronunciation. If it is, I think it's one akin to the kwerty versus dorvak keyboard debate. Having learned both, certainly pinyin works a lot better for me. YMMV.

It was on these boards that someone pointed out that the Taiwanese version of pinyin is now used in Taiwan. A casual search shows this government site (http://edu.ocac.gov.tw/culture/chinese/cul_kungfu/pinyin1.htm) and some explanations here (http://www.taiwanpinyin.net/).

[Alex_Dubinsky]

No, I don't know pinyin very well, but half the thread you were trying to explain to me that pinyin isn't english.

Anyway, I did find your link helpful, thank you. Now if I could only find those elementary school readers.. just the standard ones that all the kids use.

p.s. about nigga. a) i did stop b) it is funny (or at least cute) and c) to an american ear, it does sound like it enough that you turn around and go "whoa, who said that." It wasn't just me, the other american kids thought the same. And the point isn't just that they have this word/phrase. It's that the use it all the time for no reason. Don't you find that ironic? They really liked basketball too where i worked :P

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Wait... you guys think it's better to learn a completely new system of symbols, not used in any modern, living language and for all intents and purposes arbitrary, rather than one based on an existing, familiar roman alphabet with loosely similar pronunciation?

The mind boggles.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Wait... you guys think it's better to learn a completely new system of symbols, not used in any modern, living language and for all intents and purposes arbitrary, rather than one based on an existing, familiar roman alphabet with loosely similar pronunciation?Yeah, definately. At least depending what's your goal. If you want to have good pronounciation, all it does is throw you off. I'll bet the same thing happens when people try to learn, eg, French.

[Koxinga]

Perhaps, just perhaps, the moral of the story is that if you want to study a foreign language in a way that is easy and approachable . . . stay the hell away from Chinese already!

Cuz, you know, it's Chinese.

[Bambi Hassenpfeffer]

Yeah, definately. At least depending what's your goal. If you want to have good pronounciation, all it does is throw you off. I'll bet the same thing happens when people try to learn, eg, French.
But why is the American pronunciation of the Roman letters necessarily the correct one? The letters are just symbols used to represent different sounds -- that we pronounce them one way in English* doesn't make that the right way. How would you react to a Spanish speaker telling you that the way you say initial-R is wrong because you don't roll it like he does? Or a German making fun of your W because you don't pronounce it his way?

The Roman letters used in pinyin don't necessarily have any correspondence to the sounds that the same letters make in English or in French or in Spanish or in Gaelic or in Hawaiian or in Japanese or in any other language that uses the Roman letters. Get over that and you'll get what China Guy is saying to you.

*And we don't even always pronounce them the same way. Bough, through, cough, rough -- all different sounds. Cot and caught -- same sound for (most) Californians, different sounds for me and most other East Coasters. Two examples among many.

[Frylock]

But why is the American pronunciation of the Roman letters necessarily the correct one?

Alex did not imply that it is. He is alluding to the fact that someone raised reading roman characters one way may have difficulties habituating himself to pronouncing its characters differently when learning a system like Pinyin.

-FrL-

[jovan]

I'll bet the same thing happens when people try to learn, eg, French.
Aïme verrie saurie botte ittise onne-dénaillebolle zatte ze frentche iousaidge auffe zi aphabette ise ze correct ouanne. Toffe loque.

[Koxinga]

Alex did not imply that it is. He is alluding to the fact that someone raised reading roman characters one way may have difficulties habituating himself to pronouncing its characters differently when learning a system like Pinyin.

-FrL-

That's been my experience with classmates. I can always tell someone who studied using pinyin in the classroom bcs they pronounce the word for "I" incorrectly. (The character is 我 , the pinyin is "wo" and the Zhuyin is "ㄨㄛˇ".)

People studying with pinyin invariably pronounce the character as "whoah" like you're stopping a horse, whereas it should be something like "oo-aughh". I've heard people taking their fourth year of Chinese still pronouncing it like "whoah", which frankly sounds pretty silly.

Since "oo-aughh" isn't something that can be directly conveyed very well in roman characters (at least for English speakers), and the standard pinyin is pretty misleading, IMHO learners are better off understanding from the get-go that this is a sound that *doesn't* occur in their native language by learning "ㄨㄛˇ".

It's not that bloody hard. In fact, and as I implied above, it's about the *least* complicated thing you're going to encounter as you embark on your decade-long path to moderate fluency.

[China Guy]

I'd say Koxinga (which is pinyin btw :D ) it is likely that you're either using exceptions to prove the rule or confusing Taiwanese pronunciation with mainland broadcast mandarin (and especially with Beijingese). Taiwanese standard Mandarin versus Mainland is somewhat different, it's a southern dialect, and you've got the Taiwanese (fujian) accent bleeding through. Bopomofo certainly didn't help the majority of Taiwanese that speak Taiwan Guoyu. So yes "wo" may sound a little different but I'm highly skeptical that it's owing to bopomofo versus whatever standard is used in that part of the mainland. Have you spent any serious length of time in China?

I can usually tell if a speaker of Chinese as a foreign language has studied in Taiwan or not. I can usually tell a native Mandarin speaker from Taiwan. I did live in Taiwan for 3 years and spent a year at the Chinese Normal University Mandarin Center 25 years ago. But, it's not like I speak Beijingese or even broadcast Mandarin for that matter - living 20 years south of the Yangzi river will do that to you.

Keep in mind, there is no one standardized sounding Mandarin. Even broadcast Mandarin from china and Taiwan are a bit different. Don't even get into Beijingese versus Taipei best Mandarin as those two are far apart.

(Jovan - all I can say is bwahahahahahhaahahahaha)

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

"Koxinga" is pinying? :)


People studying with pinyin invariably pronounce the character as "whoah" like you're stopping a horse, whereas it should be something like "oo-aughh". I've heard people taking their fourth year of Chinese still pronouncing it like "whoah", which frankly sounds pretty silly.

The (for lack of a better term) "Northern" style of Mandarin does pronounce it closer to "whoah" than your way. In fact, most people, if they were listening closely, would recognize your pronunciation as a Taiwanese accent, not the "correct" pronunciation.

Seriously, this is splitting hairs. No one will have an trouble understanding either pronunciation, most people won't even give a passing thought about it.

[Koxinga]

The (for lack of a better term) "Northern" style of Mandarin does pronounce it closer to "whoah" than your way. In fact, most people, if they were listening closely, would recognize your pronunciation as a Taiwanese accent, not the "correct" pronunciation.

Seriously, this is splitting hairs. No one will have an trouble understanding either pronunciation, most people won't even give a passing thought about it.


Judge for yourselves, Dopers: "whoah" or "oo-aughh"? (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?cdqchi=%E6%88%91#)

(From www.mdbg.net , which I find to be a pretty good online resource for learners.)

[jovan]

Judge for yourselves, Dopers: "whoah" or "oo-aughh"? (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?cdqchi=%E6%88%91#)

Sounds like wǒ to me.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Aïme verrie saurie botte ittise onne-dénaillebolle zatte ze frentche iousaidge auffe zi aphabette ise ze correct ouanne. Toffe loque.haha

When I was in Shanghai, I worked with a guy from France. He spoke fluent chinese (and even better english), but sometimes I wasn't sure if he was speaking mandarin or french :D


About academically-schooled people saying "wo" like "whoah" or exaggerating their tones or otherwise sounding weird. I think it also has a lot to do with the Chinese pronounciation tapes. The people on them, speaking as slowly, clearly, and unnaturally as they can, do say "whoah." This paradigm of language instruction is a big pe peeve of mine. There is certianly a place for the instructor to exaggerate pronounciation to make a point, but there's also a place to say words quickly and even mangled, like a normal speaker. Also you can't learn pronounciation by hearing three people all your life (your professor, and the man and woman on your tape). Tapes should have dozens of speakers with some talking clearly and some not. I don't understand why that's not done, except maybe cost.

[Wendell Wagner]

Alex_Dubinsky writes:

> Still, I have a feeling that there are some rarer sounds that don't typically get
> included even in pronunciation guides. Like I said, English has em (particularly
> with foreign words like fiance). I guess I also wanted to learn more about what
> it's like for a language to transition to being written phonetically and how
> phoneticism affects it. Whether non-phonetic languages are "wilder" in terms of
> sounds, because maybe in the act of teaching phonetics you simplify (eg my
> introductory books on chinese). But oh well, I guess no one's in a mood to
> philosophize linguistically.

Once again, there is no such thing as a non-phonetic language. All languages have finite (and rather small) set of phonemes that they use for all the sounds of the language. The fact that a language is written in a non-phonetic script (like Chinese characters) has nothing to do with it having phonemes. It's possible that some Chinese speakers may know a foreign language well and thus will occasionally throw a foreign word into their speech in which they use non-Chinese phonemes, but the same thing is true of English or any other language. Essentially, writing a language in a phonetic script has no effect on the language.

[Frylock]

Alex_Dubinsky writes:

> Still, I have a feeling that there are some rarer sounds that don't typically get
> included even in pronunciation guides. Like I said, English has em (particularly
> with foreign words like fiance). I guess I also wanted to learn more about what
> it's like for a language to transition to being written phonetically and how
> phoneticism affects it. Whether non-phonetic languages are "wilder" in terms of
> sounds, because maybe in the act of teaching phonetics you simplify (eg my
> introductory books on chinese). But oh well, I guess no one's in a mood to
> philosophize linguistically.

Once again, there is no such thing as a non-phonetic language.

Of course there are. Alex's post makes it clear that by "non-phonetic language" he means "A language that is not normally written down using an alphabet." There are plenty of such languages. Chinese is one of them.

Alex wonders whether a language's being non-phonetic contributes to a language's phonemes being more variable than those of phonetic languages. The answer to this question of Alex's is "no." Cites would be appropriate, but I don't have them. Someone like you might, and they would be appreciated. The seemingly intentional and clearly condescending refusal to understand what he's asking, I am sure, are not.

-FrL-

[China Guy]

sometimes I wasn't sure if he was speaking mandarin or french

This paradigm of language instruction is a big pe peeve of mine. There is certianly a place for the instructor to exaggerate pronounciation to make a point, but there's also a place to say words quickly and even mangled, like a normal speaker. Also you can't learn pronounciation by hearing three people all your life (your professor, and the man and woman on your tape). Tapes should have dozens of speakers with some talking clearly and some not. I don't understand why that's not done, except maybe cost.Alex - is this your first foreign language? if yes, I feel for you and it also explains some of your perceptions (and not being snarky here). the thing is, 'textbook' language/tapes or classroom language is a structured way to get you on a bcycle and the training wheels off. it's a necessary evil to get the student to a base level. otherwise language study and especially chinese is like learning to ride a unicycle blindfolded on an incline with zero experience. not imposdible but pretty tough.

Shanghaiese sounds similar to french, and calling someone a 'french person' is in the slang.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Chinese is actually my third language (well, fourth, but i'm not gonna count Latin). The second language I learned was English, around the age of 9. Obviously it's much easier to learn a language at that age, but the unstructured way I went about it also gives me some perspective. I think there's a fundamental problem with "structured" language learning. It's short term gain for long term loss. So yeah, tring to understand a bunch of different speakers, for example, will definately be more difficult in the beginning. But the difficulty is more than worth it and the correct way to do it. When listening to that one speaker, you're actually learning this speaker's voice rather than the language itself (which goes back exactly to the talk of phonemes). Another line of argument against structured learning is that you learn it cognitively, with the wrong part of the brain.

Many modern instruction regimens, like Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, embrace a more 'natural' method and I think for good reason. You just need more discipline to not get frustrated at first when you don't understand and everything isn't being explained. It's also a good coincidence that Chinese has simple grammar, since it makes such methods much easier.

P.s. regarding bicycles, i'm against training wheels too. (They don't help you learn balance at all! they just teach you the completely wrong notion that you sit on the bike not carring which way it leans.)

p.p.s. frylock, thanks!

[China Guy]

Judge for yourselves, Dopers: "whoah" or "oo-aughh"? (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?cdqchi=%E6%88%91#) Woah, dude, your site gives the Mandarin pronunciation followed by the Cantonese. :eek:

My Cantonese is weak but I looked up some obvious words that I know in both languages, for example "wen" or 问 (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict&cdcanoce=0&cdqchi=%E9%97%AE&Go=Go&cddmtm=0&cddytm=0).

[China Guy]

Chinese is actually my third language (well, fourth, but i'm not gonna count Latin). The second language I learned was English, around the age of 9. Obviously it's much easier to learn a language at that age, but the unstructured way I went about it also gives me some perspective. I think there's a fundamental problem with "structured" language learning. It's short term gain for long term loss. So yeah, tring to understand a bunch of different speakers, for example, will definately be more difficult in the beginning. But the difficulty is more than worth it and the correct way to do it. When listening to that one speaker, you're actually learning this speaker's voice rather than the language itself (which goes back exactly to the talk of phonemes). Another line of argument against structured learning is that you learn it cognitively, with the wrong part of the brain.Well, then you probably know what best fits your language learning style. I would suggest if you do get really serious about learning Chinese, is that you have to learn characters. IMHO it's not possible to really get good chinese without understanding the characters, and how they fit together. Chinese is an extremely logical language, but you have to have the building blocks. I suppose it is possible to get those blocks without memorizing 6 or 10 thousand characters but I've yet to meet someone studying Chinese as a foreign language that has gotten to an impressive level of fluency via oral work alone.

[Frylock]

Well, then you probably know what best fits your language learning style. I would suggest if you do get really serious about learning Chinese, is that you have to learn characters. IMHO it's not possible to really get good chinese without understanding the characters, and how they fit together. Chinese is an extremely logical language, but you have to have the building blocks. I suppose it is possible to get those blocks without memorizing 6 or 10 thousand characters but I've yet to meet someone studying Chinese as a foreign language that has gotten to an impressive level of fluency via oral work alone.

This is strange. It's not like there's any inherent or natural relationship between the language and the writing system.

Maybe it's just that the people who have learned to write it have usually been, in virtue of that very fact, the people who have worked longer and harder at learning Chinese.

-FrL-

[Dr. Drake]

A distinction should probably be made between learning Chinese in Chinese-speaking areas and elsewhere. Illiterate folks have learned fluent Chinese as a second language for millennia. That said, I'm with China Guy. An awful lot of literate people get so thrown by another script that they make a Herculean effort to learn Russian, Arabic, Chinese, whatever without learning the writing system, or else decide that they can wait and then learn to read and write once they achieve fluency. But the writing system can be a tool to help learn the language, and I can't really see an advantage to avoiding it. I've only flirted with Chinese, but it didn't take long to learn a couple dozen characters, or to learn how to look them up in a dictionary. Once you've done that a great curtain of mystery is lifted. It is completely worth the effort.

[Lemur866]

I agree that the question about fitting sounds to phonemes is interesting. Standard english has lots of phonemes that most people aren't even aware of. Like the "zh" sound in "pleasure" or "leisure" or "azure" or "Jean-luc Picard". Here's a phoneme that we don't even have a standardized workaround for. Or that we have two "th" sounds, not one (who do I have to kill to bring edh and thorn back into the alphabet?). And of course, all sorts of vowels that can be just about anything.

So the question could be, after a few centuries of "phonetic" writing, does spoken language pronunciation become modified to fit more closely with the phonetic spelling. Do those phonems that don't have a standardized system of representation become deprecated and start to fade away?

And it seems to me as a non-linguist that the quick answer is no. Look at our english spelling, and our pronunciation of many words has very little to do with how those words are pronounced. We learn the words first, and only later learn to spell them. People don't start mispronouncing "action" as "ak-tee-on" when they learn to spell it, and eventually ak-tee-on becomes the standard way of pronouncing the word. It seems like the spelling is fixed, but the pronounciation varies, which is why we have all these weird silent k's and silent gh's, and so forth. The gh phoneme vanished from standard english, despite being right there written down in our spelling. Writing it down didn't preserve it.

The exception would be foreign words that become pronounced as they're spelled, like "Paris" pronounced "Pare-is" rather than "Par-ee".

The only problem is that the only language I'm familiar with is English, so I have no idea how typical english is. I do know that other languages have undergone periodic spelling reforms, but I don't know whether spelling reform is sometimes done because of widespread pronunciation changes.

[Windwalker]

This is strange. It's not like there's any inherent or natural relationship between the language and the writing system.

Maybe it's just that the people who have learned to write it have usually been, in virtue of that very fact, the people who have worked longer and harder at learning Chinese.

-FrL-

It goes beyond that with Chinese. At first, all I wanted was to be orally fluent, but I soon realized that to really understand how the language works, to really get the meaning behind certain words, it was much, much easier to look at what the composite characters mean.

For example (and far from the best example, just off the top of my head), kuo4zhan3 means to expand, spread, or enlarge. But there are actually a number of words that mean something similar, and it's hard to really understand which word fits which situation (a very common problem). There's kuo4da4, kuo4chong1, kuo4zhang1, etc. Sometimes they can be used interchangeably, but sometimes not. Looking at the characters for kuo4zhan3, kuo4 has that expanding/spreading meaning. zhan3 can have a similar meaning but also encompasses a sense of development (like in the word fa1zhan3, which means to develop). Thus, you know that kuo4zhan3 has to do with expansions that are developing towards something, and probably doesn't refer to say, a cyclical swelling.

Since any given syllable pronunciation (such as zhan3) can be any one of a multitude of characters, it's nice to be able to read and know that it is indeed the zhan3 that is used in fa1zhan3, which not only makes it easier to understand what kuo4zhan3 means, but also makes it easier to remember, at least for me. When I hear the word now, since I am familiar with the characters, I can parse the word as kuo4da4-fa1zhan3 (expand-develop), which is a pretty good summary of the meaning.

This is much, much easier than learning every single 2-syllable combination's precise meaning just by pronunciation alone. I never thought I'd say it, but I do need me my characters!

[Alex_Dubinsky]

No, I want to learn characters. I've learned several dozen already, primarily from Rosetta Stone and those kids books I was talking about. So please, if someone can help me search google.cn for those first-grade PRC elementary school readers, I'd greatly appreciate it. They've got both pinyin and characters. I use the pinyin to search in a computer dictionary, then painstakingly try to match up the character among the dozens of results. I think this is a good way for me to learn in a 'natural' way. It's a bit funny, but it's actually easier to recognize the distincitive characters than those damn overlapping syllables, so the pinyin on the page doesn't subtract from the learning at all and helps a lot. (Looking up characters entirely by stroke is maddening, and just c&p a character and getting the answer isn't good either. I think I've found a good compromise with my method.)

[bordelond]

I may not be reading the thread closely enough, but it doesn't seem like the OP was answered directly.


Chinese, of course, is not normally written phonetically. However, since the communists came to power, they standardized on the pinyin system of transcribing their language using roman characters (the characters took up new sounds, however). My question is, how was this really possible?
It was possible because all spoken languages are divisible into what are called phonemes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme) (see link for definition). These phonemes are artifacts of speech, independent of writing, and so exist in all languages, pre-literate or not -- the point being that these phonemes already existed in Chinese to be "described" by phonetic writing just like they do in any other language. That Chinese did not have phonetic writing for most of its history had no bearing.

Did their language naturally divide into 20 or so sounds (?) ...
Essentially, yes. Yes, it did. Except that those divisions -- the phonemes mentioned above -- were always present in Chinese.

... or was there some square-peg-in-round-hole action? Even in Englsh, which coexisted with phonetic spelling all its life, there's tons of sounds that don't really fit into our alphabet at all.
In commiting any speech to phonetic writing (or an approximation thereof), there is always some square-peg-in-round-hole action. The Latin alphabet was laid imperfectly onto English, the Etruscan alphabet was laid imperfectly onto Latin, the Greek alphabet was laid imperfectly onto Etruscan ... and so forth.

As pointed out upthread, English has not always been a written language. That's true of all modern written languages -- it's important to remember that the fit is not always, and can never be, "natural" and perfect. Pinyin is no different.

[Wendell Wagner]

Frylock writes:

> Of course there are. Alex's post makes it clear that by "non-phonetic language"
> he means "A language that is not normally written down using an alphabet."
> There are plenty of such languages. Chinese is one of them.

It's far from clear what Alex_Dubinsky meant in his post. Apparently, bordelond agrees with me about this, because he/she has also tried to explain to Alex_Dubinsky what a phoneme is and that all languages have them. I still think that Alex_Dubinsky didn't understand in his OP that Chinese not being written down in a phonetic script has nothing to do with it having phonemes.

[Frylock]

Frylock writes:

> Of course there are. Alex's post makes it clear that by "non-phonetic language"
> he means "A language that is not normally written down using an alphabet."
> There are plenty of such languages. Chinese is one of them.

It's far from clear what Alex_Dubinsky meant in his post. What are you talking about? Look at the very next thing you wrote:

Apparently, bordelond agrees with me about this, because he/she has also tried to explain to Alex_Dubinsky what a phoneme is and that all languages have them.

Exactly. Explaining about phonemes is exactly the right way to answer the perfectly clear quetions Alex asked in the OP.

Meanwhile, in the post of mine you were responding to, I was not addressing Alex's OP but rather a later one.

-FrL-

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Also, my exact question was "naturally divide into 20 or so sounds" and my suspicion was partly on the mark because it turns out there's twice that many phonemes, encoded as nuances in the pinyin.

Also, I'm not exactly convinced about this phoneme business (I mean I agree there's phonemes... just read). For example, when reading china_guys pronunciation guide, it tried to explain how to pronounce pinyin's "sh." It went on that it is not the english 'sh' but does sound pretty much like the 'sh' in the word 'shirt'. In that particular word, the letters 'ir' induce the tongue to travel back in the mouth for pronouncing 'sh', which is how the Chinese always do it. But if good english speakers pronounce that word 'shirt' with that sound, would it hurt your pronounciation to use a different kind of 'sh'? Phoneme is the unit of understanding, but there's definately sub-phonemes that define good annunciation, or a standard accent, or a pleasant voice. They very much exist and are even worth learning (i'm sure any voice coach will tell you exactly that). So I don't know... at the very least there's phonemes and sub-phonemes, but in that case there's got to be sounds in a gray zone too. You know, when I tried researching "the number of phonemes in English" and found no two sources that would agree on one number, I will bet you anything it wasn't just because English has several accents.

[Dr. Drake]

You might want to check out the concept of allophones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone). That's the name for when two different sounds are understood to be the same by speakers of a given language, as in your "shirt" example. The article explains it better.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Cool!

The examples section alone adds 40 (!) extra sounds (phones) to English that are invoked only in specific phonetic contexts.

[China Guy]

It goes beyond that with Chinese. At first, all I wanted was to be orally fluent, but I soon realized that to really understand how the language works, to really get the meaning behind certain words, it was much, much easier to look at what the composite characters mean. You described it well. Even when two native chinese speakers talk, they frequently interrupt each other to ask specifically what character is being referred to. There are so many subtle differences between characters that sound the same.

Keep in mind that characters are pictograms with specific meanings and associations. Maybe it's an added layer on top of the sound or an extra dimension. I'd argue that characters are a significant part of the Chinese language and thus different from an alphabet based language. (There was a 6 page Winter of our Missed Content thread on this subject). Not only does a word have a common definition like in English, but there is also a common pictogram. I can't explain what difference this makes, but IMHO this commonly understood extra dimension is not insignificant. Even a native illiterate Chinese speaker is limited to the one language dimension.

With a decent base of Chinese characters, the average reader can take two characters that they recognize, put them together and have a high percentage chance of knowing what that compounded meaning is. Think Greek suffixes for an example such as "-ist" eg chemist, physicist. In Chinese, you have a character of "ist" (but differs in that there are few or zero exceptions), eg chemist, physicist, doctor, nurse, professor would all have that "ist" suffix.

[China Guy]

pronunciation guide, it tried to explain how to pronounce pinyin's "sh." It went on that it is not the english 'sh' but does sound pretty much like the 'sh' in the word 'shirt'. In that particular word, the letters 'ir' induce the tongue to travel back in the mouth for pronouncing 'sh', which is how the Chinese always do it. But if good english speakers pronounce that word 'shirt' with that sound, would it hurt your pronounciation to use a different kind of 'sh'? As long as the other word uses the same phoneme, it should have the same equivalent pronunciation. Again, keep in mind that the English phoneme used in "shirt" may not be an exact 100% match to the Beijing pronunciation/phoneme for shi(r) (verb "to be" - I can't display Chinese on this new PC yet). If "shit" was used instead of "shirt", I think that's a different phoneme, and in Chinese shit (equivalent to shi) and shirt (equivalent to the Beijing R shi(r)). Someone that does understand phonemes, is this right?

Linguists use an equivalent sound in one language as a base to train speakers how to make the correct sound in the other language. My Chinese professor at University was also a linguist. If you couldn't make the correct sound in Chinese, he'd walk you through a checklist of English words until he found a word you could pronounce properly in English with the equivalent Chinese sound. I also witnessed him work with some Hong Kong Chinese with very thick accents and some horrible English mispronunciations, and within two minutes would find a different word with an equivalent sound that they could pronounce. I can't think of a great example, but something like you would mispronounce " noun" but could pronounce "pronoun" correctly. Then you would work on isolating the noun part of pronoun, and the pronunciation would be much improved if not perfect.

[Koxinga]

But if good english speakers pronounce that word 'shirt' with that sound, would it hurt your pronounciation to use a different kind of 'sh'? Phoneme is the unit of understanding, but there's definately sub-phonemes that define good annunciation, or a standard accent, or a pleasant voice. They very much exist and are even worth learning (i'm sure any voice coach will tell you exactly that). So I don't know... at the very least there's phonemes and sub-phonemes, but in that case there's got to be sounds in a gray zone too. You know, when I tried researching "the number of phonemes in English" and found no two sources that would agree on one number, I will bet you anything it wasn't just because English has several accents.

I'm not sure if I can follow everything here, but I suspect in some instances you're confusing phonemes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme) with morphemes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme). A phoneme is a sound that distinguishes meaning, but doesn't have any meaning (semantic value) in itself. A morpheme "is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning."

The thing about Chinese, I think, is that its morphology is sort of codified by the characters, and the morphology is much closer to the surface, as it were. It's easy to see the morphological components of a given two- or three-character word when each morpheme is represented by its own little picture.

But I also believe that China Guy is exaggerating the influence of this written quirk upon the spoken language. English is equally rich in morphemes for any given word--if anything even more so, given the language's mongrel heritage. But most people don't realize this because we don't use ideograms. (Sorry, another nitpick: Chinese primarily uses ideograms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram) or maybe logograms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram), not pictograms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram#History).

Example: even if I'm illiterate, I know what a "television" is. I don't need to worry about "tele" meaning "far" in Greek and "vision" meaning "sight" in Latin. OTOH, a Chinese speaker can point to the characters for "electric" and "vision" put together and have a pretty good idea where the word dianshi, "television" in Chinese, came from. But he doesn't have to know this to understand the word, no more so than the English speaker.

[Alex_Dubinsky]

China_guy, no. It seems there are phonemes, complementary allophones, and free variants. Phonemes are usually defined by a 'minimal pair', which is two words that are almost the same, except for that one sound. However, not every phoneme has a minimal pair (and there are minimal pairs that aren't phonemes). Sometimes it's decided just cuz they're just 'obviously' different (well, no, there's other criteria too). Complementary allophones are differences in pronounciation that have a clear pattern to them across many speakers, but aren't quite important enough to be phonemes (consider 'p' in 'pin' vs 'spin'. in chinese these even belong to different phonemes, and the latter is written 'b' in pinyin). Free variants (the other type of allophone) are peculiarities that are specific to one person. They can also be specific to a group of people, but they're not important/regular enough to be complementary allophones.

So as you can see, obviously, there are judgement calls everywhere. So yes, it seems a language IS a zoo of sound and not just a set of a few dozen phonemes. But it's a heirarchical zoo, with some elements clearly more important than others. The sprawling heirarchy is what accounts for, respectively, comprehensibility, dialect, accent, diction, voice, and ultimately tone and mood.

Pinyin and any other alphabet can only hope to capture the upper echelons. And even then, as well all know too well in the online world, that's often nowhere enough to understand what a person is actually saying (much less to imagine them saying it). To have excellent pronounciation and speech (eg, to be a spy at the CIA), you need mastery of most of this pyramid. Which is a monumental task.

Anyway, thanks guys, I've learned a lot. Especially how fundamentally important it is to forget pinyin and all that garbage (i mean for this purpose) and just listen to speakers on tv and movies and take it in, focusing on what you actually hear than on preconceived notions such as how it's spelled. Hopefully, understanding the challenge before me, I'll one day speak so well that no one will even know i'm not chinese ;)

[gitfiddle]

chinese actually does have phonetic characters. from those phonetic characters came a system called Zhuyinfuhao (bopomofo), which was used widely in Taiwan. I believe Taiwan has switched over to a close but not quite the same mainland pinyin system.

I apologize if someone else has already said this, I haven't read the whole thread.

Taiwan recently decided to standardize (http://onlyredheadintaiwan.blogspot.com/2007/11/taiwan-to-standardize-romanization-but.html) its romanizations since, for example, the street 忠孝 can be written "Chunghsiao, Zhongxiao and Jhongsiao." This gets to be really difficult for a lot of foreigners, seeing as place names around Taiwan change (When you're in Taipei, signs lead you to XinDian, but once you get out of Taipei all you see is HsinTian).

Taiwan, for some reason, didn't want to go with the most recognized romanization, pinyin. They've opted for TongYong, which almost no one outside of Taiwan studies. In fact, I don't even know of people inside Taiwan who study it, seeing as I've never met anyone from any university here that studies Chinese with anything other than pinyin.

This said, the big difference, though, is that Taiwanese by and large don't know how to read pinyin, tongyong, etc. While the Chinese use pinyin to learn Chinese and to write with a computer, the Taiwanese use Zhuyin, which is why I learned it. If you want to read Children's books and stuff to learn Chinese in Taiwan, you have to be able to read zhuyin.

[Frylock]

As long as the other word uses the same phoneme, it should have the same equivalent pronunciation.

Not true. See previous reference to allophones.

-FrL-

[Nava]

Alex did not imply that it is. He is alluding to the fact that someone raised reading roman characters one way may have difficulties habituating himself to pronouncing its characters differently when learning a system like Pinyin.

-FrL-

But that also happens to someone who's learned any Western European language when learning another one.

Europa is pronounced europa in Spanish but oigopa in German, using Spanish transliterations. Same spelling and both languages are internally consistant.

[gitfiddle]

IMHO Zhuyinfuhao blows monkey chow. YMMV. And it sucks in the computer age. And even Taiwan is now using their own version of pinyin instead in schools.

As I've mentioned, there is a movement to standardize romanization here in Taiwan, but only for foreigners who can't read Chinese. I've still yet to meet any Taiwanese people who are familiar with pinyin or tongyong (other than my prof. at NTU). I have never seen a kid use a romanization, either (and I have some very young students. In all my experience, zhuyin is still very much the norm for Taiwanese people.

I like zhuyin. It was a bitch to learn, but I find that I understand the pronunciations much better. I understand the different sounds better. I know that sounds imbecilic, but it is a little clearer. For example, 出 is written "chu" in pinyin, while 區 is (90% of the time) written "qu" (rarely is the two-dot thingy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29) written above it like this: ü). It was surprised to see when I started learning zhuyin that they were signified by two different symbols -- ㄨ and ㄩ, respectively.

That's just one example. Pinyin also has superfluous y's and w's floating around.

All that said, I'm not saying that pinyin is not a much easier very effective way to learn Chinese. I just think it's a good idea to learn both.

[gitfiddle]

Funny, as a foreigner living in Taiwan, I've always used Zhuyin Fuhao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zh%C3%B9y%C4%ABn_f%C3%BAh%C3%A0o), many of my friends are schoolteachers here and use it all the time to teach elementary school kids Chinese (never even heard of a "pinyin" beng taught), and everyone in my office uses it as the preferred input system when typing Chinese on their computers. I use it to type myself, though painstakingly--but some ladies in the office can type Chinese faster than I can type English.

This has also been my experience...

[gitfiddle]

I just want to apologize for having commented before finishing the thread. I apologize for my redundant input....

Such bad etiquette....

[Koxinga]

I know that sounds imbecilic, but it is a little clearer. For example, 出 is written "chu" in pinyin, while 區 is (90% of the time) written "qu" (rarely is the two-dot thingy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29) written above it like this: ü).

Actually, I believe that it would be incorrect to use an umlaut for "u" when it occurs after "j" "q" or "x". The typical, non-umlaut "u" never occurs after those initials, and so the designers of pinyin declared that an umlaut would be superfluous--at least, I remember learning as such. Of course, unless you knew Chinese already, that wouldn't be immediately obvious.

I agree that zhuyin and pinyin are both very handy, but for different purposes.

[Frylock]

But that also happens to someone who's learned any Western European language when learning another one.

Europa is pronounced europa in Spanish but oigopa in German, using Spanish transliterations. Same spelling and both languages are internally consistant.

Yup.

Why did you point that out?

-FrL-

[Frylock]

I like zhuyin. It was a bitch to learn, but I find that I understand the pronunciations much better. I understand the different sounds better. I know that sounds imbecilic, but it is a little clearer. For example, 出 is written "chu" in pinyin, while 區 is (90% of the time) written "qu" (rarely is the two-dot thingy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29) written above it like this: ü). It was surprised to see when I started learning zhuyin that they were signified by two different symbols -- ㄨ and ㄩ, respectively.


Something slipped past me.

If it's written with different symbols in pinyin, why were you suprised it's written using different symbols in zhuyin?

-FrL-

[Koxinga]

Something slipped past me.

If it's written with different symbols in pinyin, why were you suprised it's written using different symbols in zhuyin?

-FrL-

He's talking about the pinyin letter "u", which in certain circumstances could represent one of two different sounds. In zhuyin the symbols are consistently different.

[Nava]

Yup.

Why did you point that out?

-FrL-

Because the difficulty is the same in learning a second "European" phonetic system as in learning the phonetic system of one transliterated from another alphabet. Millions of people have more-or-less managed the first without their brains exploding (I say more-or-less because for example I mangle the English J and Anglos mangle mine... the end results are still understandable though).

[Wendell Wagner]

Frylock, I was talking about all of Alex_Dubinsky's posts up to the my post, not just the OP. It wasn't clear if he understood the idea of phonemes at that point. It's still not clear that he understands the idea of phonemes. It's also not clear to me that you understand what I was talking about in my post.

[China Guy]

He's talking about the pinyin letter "u", which in certain circumstances could represent one of two different sounds. In zhuyin the symbols are consistently different.In pinyin, it is clearly written as two different sounds. "u" and "ü" (now written on most computer programs or cell phones as a "v". It's not a missing sound, but clearly differentiated. An example would be the color green lü (lv) versus road lu.

Regardless of what system, they are all meant as intermediate steps for students to get to the right pronunciation, as dictionary tools, and as a computer input method. Even at a basic level, the default for Chinese speakers is to use common words (characters) as the benchmark such as lüse de lü. Chinese speakers don't spell it out in zhuyin or pinyin.

One of you bopomofo guys can probably tell me. I suspect that zhuyinfuhao has it's roots in the Japanese kana system. The Japanese kana uses either symbols and or romanization. When I studied Japanese, there was never any debate over whether the kana or romanization were better tools for learning Japanese.

[Koxinga]

In pinyin, it is clearly written as two different sounds. "u" and "ü" (now written on most computer programs or cell phones as a "v". It's not a missing sound, but clearly differentiated. An example would be the color green lü (lv) versus road lu.

Getting a bit more arcane here, but what about "green", lü vs. "to go", qu, or "month", yue? In this case, what Zhuyin consistently represents as "ㄩ" is indicated in pinyin by either "ü", "u" or "yu" depending on context.

Cite from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table) that matches printed pinyin tables I've seen in my textbooks. Note the "colour legend" that explains these exceptions.

[gitfiddle]

One of you bopomofo guys can probably tell me. I suspect that zhuyinfuhao has it's roots in the Japanese kana system. The Japanese kana uses either symbols and or romanization. When I studied Japanese, there was never any debate over whether the kana or romanization were better tools for learning Japanese.
It appears (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin) they come from ancient Chinese characters. For instance, ㄖ (ri) apparently comes from the ancient form of 日.

[China Guy]

Getting a bit more arcane here, but what about "green", lü vs. "to go", qu, or "month", yue? In this case, what Zhuyin consistently represents as "ㄩ" is indicated in pinyin by either "ü", "u" or "yu" depending on context.A linguist would have to address this, but I believe it's based on the initial sound. Lü/green has a different mouth shape/tounge placement initially than yue/month. Therefore, that's why only lü and nü have the umlats.

Gitfiddle, I'm sure zhuyin is derived from Chinese characters. My question is this a copy of the Japanese kana or Korean hangul concepts? Was there ever a debate or plan to use zhuyin as an actual substitute for characters akin to the kana system. Eg, for common words, for foreign words, etc.?

[gitfiddle]

Gitfiddle, I'm sure zhuyin is derived from Chinese characters. My question is this a copy of the Japanese kana or Korean hangul concepts? Was there ever a debate or plan to use zhuyin as an actual substitute for characters akin to the kana system. Eg, for common words, for foreign words, etc.?

Sorry. I misunderstood.

When you ask if zhuyin is a copy of kana or hangul, do you mean the actual bopomofo order or the concept itself of having a system of phonetic representation.

I just recently finished Empires of the Word (which is an amazing book and is relevant to a lot of comments in this thread). Ostler says that the actual order of the bopomofo alphabet is based on Sanskrit.

I'm at work now, so I can't give any specifics.

[China Guy]

The concept of having some sort of syllabic system in lieu of some Chinese characters. For example (and grossly simplify), the Japanese katakana system is for foreign words in the Japanese language. Instead of writing out characters for "President Bush" this specific term would be in zhuyin.

Just curious if Ostler says bopomofo is based on Sanskrit or actually Tibetan (which is based on Sanskrit).

[gitfiddle]

Looking at the passage again, I'm wondering if I drew the wrong conclusion.

Here's the quote from Ostler (Empires of the Word, "Charming Like a Creeper" p. 209-210):

One effect [Sanskrit] did have was on Chinese phonetics. Chinese scholars of the Tang Period (seventh to eighth centuries), knowing the Sanskrit alphabetic tradition could identify the initial consonants of characters, called them 字母, 'word mothers', apparently after the Sanskrit term matrka, 'maternal', which is also a letter of the alphabet. These were used to systematize the traditional practice for indicating pronunciation in dictionaries: Chinese dictionaries have always done this by what is called fanqie, linking a character with two others, one with the same initial consonant, and the other with the same tone and rhyme. Putting this into a systematic chart was a very modest step in linguistic understanding, since no further analysis of the rhyme part (for example, into vowels and consonants) was undertaken.

He then goes on to talk about Japanese, mentioning the order of sounds in the Sanskrit and Japanese alphabets:

This is not an arbitrary order like our ABCD... Rather it appeals to various purely phentic properties of the sounds represented. So, for example, all the consonants are placed in an order where the tongue contact gradually advances from the back to the front of the mouth cavity.


What I drew from this was the origin of the bpmf order, which he doesn't explicitly say. Yet, it makes sense. But, bpmf goes from front to back, not back to front. The first four sounds come from the lips, the next four coming from the tongue touching the roof of the mouth (and moving backwards), and so on...

So, I don't know if Sanskrit did effect bpmf, but it seems like it to me.