Traveling in Guangxi, digging a little bit into exotic* Binyang Dialect while taking in the scenery (Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Beijing anymore). I’ve done some cursory searching online but failed to find a romanization for Binyanghua, so I thought it would be fun to try making one myself and put the recordings up for the listening pleasure of anyone else who loves a good voiceless alveolar lateral fricative aka ‘voiceless el’ [ɬ]. Who knew a Sinitic language would have consonant phonology in common with frickin’ [forgive the pun] Welsh!

The goal is utilitarian: I’d like to be able to hear a word and write it down with confidence that I’ve got the basic phonemes right, including the phonemic tones.

How does one do a romanization? Unfortunately I have no academic background here, but I believe the following would be classified as the Empirical Brute Force method. Can’t say how well it’s gonna work, but least it’s a starting point. Got ideas about how to proceed with analysis, samples you’d like to hear, or references I could look into? I’d love feedback!

BYHR = my attempt at a BinYangHua Romanization.

WARNING: This post is just a starting point, and what follows in the numbered sections is more or less a chronological exploration. The BYHR in the first sections is full of inaccuracies and inconsistencies. As I work my way through subsequent sections, I’m revising my hypotheses about what sounds and tones are phonemic. If you want to be boring and skip all the hemming and hawing, you can go to the end of the post to read the running hypotheses. I will try to follow up with future posts, but my time is short and it’s better not to make promises when your previous post was, oh, about two years ago.

Sample 1: “I’m drinking water”

“I’m drinking water” 我正在喝水
OK, this sounds straightforward enough. Not really that far off Mandarin. I’ll try breaking it down syllable by syllable.

Sample 2: “Drink it down in one gulp”

“Drink it down in one gulp” 一口喝下去
Yikes. This is sounding a bit more exotic now. Is that something like /bl/ in the fourth syllable? It’s harder to divide the syllables this time, but here’s my attempt.

Sample 3: One thru Twenty

As long as we seem to have a number (yet = 1) in the sentence above, let’s try listening to a bunch of numbers.

Interesting. Before starting this numbers exercise I hadn’t thought about how useful numbers might be for understanding the tonal system. I’ll come back to this.

Sample 4: “Make / wrap zongzi”

“Make / wrap zongzi” 包粽子 [supposedly aka “sticky rice dumplings” — good stuff]

Sample 5: “Binyang’s ‘fire cracker dragons’ are really famous”

“Binyang’s ‘fire cracker dragons’ are really famous” 宾阳炮龙很有名 [And pretty cool too. Do an images search for 炮龙]

Sample 6. Days of week

 Sample 7. “Today is Sunday”

“Today is Sunday” 今天是星期日

 Sample 8. “My hometown is Binyang”

“My hometown is Binyang” 我老家在宾阳

Sample 9: “I’m playing guitar”

“I’m playing guitar” 我正在弹吉他

Mostly I liked this sentence because of how “guitar”ish 吉他 sounds compared to Mandarin!

Sample 10: “Thank you, Teacher”

“Thank you, Teacher” 谢谢老师

Working hypotheses

For initials, it seems like we’ve got the following so far and I’m pretty sure there are more. In the Examples column I’m including the tone markings just so you can do a Find in the browser and get to the relevant sample.

OK, now the same for finals

What about tones? There’s really not enough data yet. My hunches are like this

Also, possible tone sandhi: two flat-high tones next to each other, the second one is slightly lower, e.g. hat44sei33

Stuff I’m confused about…

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*宾阳话 is a subset of the top level Sinitic fangyan group Pinghua, which is to say Pinghua is parallel to Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese), etc. To paraphrase Wikipedia’s Pinghua entry and Baidu Baike’s 宾阳话 entry, in the past Pinghua was classified as part of Yue, but it was split off in the 1980s. It qualifies as exotic cuz there aren’t many speakers, as Sinitic languages go: total around 2m for Pinghua and 800,000ish for Binyanghua. It counts among its speakers both Han and Zhuang, and there seems to be some serious ethnic mixing according to one genetic study I came across.

China Realtime Report put up a good piece about Phonemica. I thought the title not bad: “Getting China’s Tower of Babel on Record“.

A lot of you might see the article anyway, but I doubt you’d make it over to the comments, and the very first comment is probably one that Sinoglot readers and writers alike have spent way too much time thinking about:

What is the distinction between a language and a dialect?

Since I thought Kellen’s response gave a pretty nice simple summary, and since I know he’d be too shy to repost it himself, I thought I’d give it its very own Sinoglot post:

The real answer is that there is no answer. The distinction is arbitrary and can be motivated by a number of different factors; It can be political, historical, sociological, or just based on convenience. For example High German, Low German and Dutch form a continuum where a speaker from one end can’t understand a speaker from the other end if each is speaking their own hometown dialects, but speakers from any two neighbouring towns will have little trouble in communicating. China is made up of a number of such continuums, Mandarin being one, Cantonese another, Wu a third. For the project we treat Cantonese as a language and Mandarin as another language, but with a distant common ancestor, the same as Italian and Spanish are related through Latin. This is the reason we tend to group the entirety of our focus in the project under “Sinitic”, referring to any modern language variety that is descended from Old Chinese. The shared relationship of these language varieties is known, and the appropriateness of different degrees of fineness in distinctions between them is different for different situations.

This keeps coming up with transcription work. The question is, when transcribing a person speaking their local dialect, what characters should you use? I provide the following definitions, which are up for debate:

本字 běnzì – The character that most accurately represents the word in etymology. In a way, it shows the cognates.
正字 zhèngzì – The “Standard” character. That which represents the meaning of the intended word for a wider audience.

As a semi-hypothetical example, Dialect X has a word that means “high” or “tall”, read “huan”. It’s cognate with Mandarin 懸 xuán as any educated speaker will tell you. A speaker of Dialect X may write it as 懸, or they may just write 高. They wouldn’t say 高 gāo or a cognate of 高. But then they may assume the rest of the country which doesn’t speak their dialect might not know 懸 as having this meaning, since in Standard Mandarin 懸 means “to hang”. So if you can imagine, they’re still writing in their dialect, but they’ve changed the characters to make it just a little easier to read for a wider audience.

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Can Sinoglot readers puzzle out the romanized version of a name of Chinese origins? Chris Waugh writes:

Got an email from a friend about a Malaysian Chinese author whose name is Khor Ewe Pin/许友彬, a bit of googling and google.com.my threw up an article in Bahasa Melayu that gave as his bahasa ‘Kantonis’ and ‘Bahasa Inggeris’ and ‘Bahasa Melayu’. A bit more googling suggested Khor is a possible romanisation of 许 in Malaysia. I made a thoroughly uneducated guess based on that Bahasa: Kantonis that Khor may be Cantonese, but neither of us has managed to find any more…. I was wondering if somebody in the Phonemica or Sinoglot communities might be able to answer this question: what ‘lect is Khor Ewe Pin? Thoughts?

UPDATE: Thanks to ahbin in the comments, I’ve added “Ping Speech” (平话) as a dialect of Cantonese. Its omission was an oversight for which I owe maybe 2 million people an apology. That brings us to 50 “sub-fangyan” (次方言) under the original 7 fangyan. This makes the title of my post obsolete, but what the heck. The sub-fangyan vs fangyan decision follows the basic scheme of the Chinese Language Atlas (中国语言地图集)

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How should Chinese be categorized, linguistically?

Fundamentals of Chinese Dialect Studies (《汉语方言学基础教程》：李小凡，项梦冰) describes how in the first half of the 20th century, the proposed divisions of Chinese increased from four in early scholarship, up to eleven in one scheme. Now most scholars are back down to seven or eight. But between language change and debates about definition, it’s a question that guarantees academic employment for years to come.

7/49 is the plan I’ve just posted on the Phonemica blog. I’m pasting the chart below. Continue…

With the mercury in Taipei rising incessantly (roads have started melting and all), it seemed as good a time as any to expand the horizons of Sinoglot’s coverage to the Pénghú 澎湖 archipelago, a group of islands in the Strait of Taiwan. Fishing and tourism are the mainstays of the economy on these islands, which are also known in Taiwan for their boisterous religious festivals and the well-preserved local culture.

So, with a little trepidation at flying in a little turboprop plane for the first time, your correspondent bravely went where no Sinoglot post had gone before. It soon turned out that the preservation of the islands’ local culture extends to its language: unlike in Taipei, Taiwanese (Mǐnnányǔ 閩南語 / Táiyǔ 台語) is still going strong on these islands – you hardly hear any Mandarin on the streets, even among the younger generations. I asked a few islanders and they all agreed that almost all kids are still learning how to speak Taiwanese and using it actively in everyday life, again unlike in Taipei.

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See below for your chance at glory in the big smackdown: Jin Chinese vs Jìnshǎn Mandarin.

Language, or dialect?

Jin Chinese is right at the heart of the never-ending fangyan / language / dialect debate (e.g. here or here or here on Sinoglot). Jin is categorized by some as a top level fangyan (方言) in its own right, comparable to Mandarin, Cantonese, etc., while others insist Jin belongs under the broad wing of Mandarin where it should be classified as a sub-fangyan (次方言), parallel to, say, the Northeast dialect or Beijing dialect.

The location of Jin speakers makes the whole debate even more intriguing: they’re right next to Beijing, practically!

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[update: followup post here]

Help! I’ve got a word to research that’s defying the dictionaries installed on my Pleco as well as my 老北京 backup resource.

Scene: my 10-yr-old daughter is doing her homework. She giggles and says:

Yàoshi bù xiě zuòyè wǒ huì gěrpì
要是不写作业我会 gěrpì

Me: gěrpì?! Continue…

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note: Sinoglot readers rock. Seriously. You guys have consistently provided good discussion, which is what we talked about wanting, what seems like ages ago, when we decided to put this site together. We’ve all been a bit busy these days so the posting has slowed down. To remedy that, I have a few quick posts I’m going to throw up here in hopes of getting some more discussion going. This is the first. Thanks for kicking ass.

I’ve written elsewhere about trying to talk to the elerly in China. On a trip to Henan province last year i was somewhat surprised by the fact that I could actually understand people and communicate with putonghua. I thought that this was a strictly southern phenomena, being unable to talk to anyone over 50, but today it seems to have crept further north than I’d otherwise thought.

Today I was talking to a friend of mine from northern Jiangsu province about dialects and communication. She was saying that her parents, not yet 50 years of age, cannot speak standard Mandarin. I figured it was not a big problem since it was still beifang-hua, so to test I had her run through the usual phrases I make everyone say. Not terribly surprisingly, it didn’t sound much like Mandarin. It was clearly a northern dialect but one that I’d have a hard time to understand in the context of a real conversation. Not yet 50.

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