Bineapple survey
It’s survey time again! It might be hard to top the 179 responses to Bowl/Plate so far, but let’s see what we can get. If you’re a native speaker of Mandarin yourself, just go on and take the survey (but don’t answer what it should be, answer how you actually say it!). Non-natives, just grab your nearest speaker and show them this:
Then answer:
[poll id=”6″]
fènglí! but if I had to pick one of the top I’d go with ‘b’
I’ve never heard anyone ever say it with a “p”.
Why would you say it with a P? Is that a thing of the North? I have never heard poluo, but perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention, I am curious to see what the natives vote.
I assume the real distinction we’re looking for is [p] vs [pʰ], not [b] vs [pʰ].
I can’t say I’ve ever heard it aspirated, but then we’ve talked about aspiration on things that in pinyin would be spelled with a b.
I ve heard it frequently pronounced as puoluo-pwoolwoo especially south of the yangtze
well I learned something today. I’ve been in Taiwan for over 10 years and never heard boluo that I can remember. I had to look it up to be sure you weren’t kidding about your poll! I’ve only heard feng4li2.
@Andrew and @Scott Pagel: Likewise, I didn’t know about fènglí!
@Kellen: no, I’m really talking about [b] vs [pʰ] — full-on aspirated P. I’ve heard [pʰ] from a few folks (I want to say they’ve all been 60+ish, but not entirely sure). I’m glad Chris chimed in so folks don’t think I’m crazy, but poll numbers so far don’t support [pʰ] being widespread.
I tend to hear boluo (in Beijing), but fengli is reasonably common on menus, especially at milk tea places. Maybe that points to a Taiwanese origin for the latter term, since a lot of the milk tea joints either are or claim to be “Taiwanese-style”?
I’ve never heard anyone say poluo.
Slightly off topic, but IMHO one of the most delicious pastries known to man is the Taiwanese 鳳梨酥 fènglísū. Never heard of a 菠萝酥.
黃梨 in Southeast Asia Mandarin. Could be some sort of pun between 鳳梨 and 凰梨.
Ahkow, thanks for that one: 黄梨 is totally new to me, but it did show up as choice #5 in my IME.
For anyone else still reading this thread… My original source of pōluó, my mother-in-law, still says it all the time. Father-in-law also says it. I suppose it could be a family quirk, but since pōluó got a couple of other votes in the survey above, I’m guessing it’s more widespread than that. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Regional thing? Would be very curious to hear from the other couple of pōluó voters about the demographics of who said it that way.