Phonemica recording meetup on July 15
Cross-posted from Phonemica: details
Jin Chinese?
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!
Back Up
In the earlier post, 3Q, we looked at the seven Mandarin dentals, z, c, s, d, t, n, l. Three sounds, z, c, s are classified in Chinese as 舌尖前 or front apical, dental. The remaining four are 舌尖中 or mid-apical, and might be called denti-alveolar.
Let us be clear, the Mandarin affricates zh and ch, known as 舌尖后音 (rear apical sounds) are indeed back from their flat-tongued (or front apical) cousins z and c. The tongue tip might indeed be said to kind of curl up…a little bit. For the purposes of phonetics, retroflex might be a suitably sciencey description. But this is kind of missing the point. Continue…
Taiwan Bopomofo slang for beginners
A lot has been said about the decision to learn Simplified or Traditional characters when you first start learning Chinese. Of course ultimately you’d learn both, but you have to start somewhere. For me it wasn’t much of a choice, since I started out on the Mainland. It wasn’t until grad school that I needed 文言文 and traditional characters, and then moving to Korea where they were all that was used (in the rare cases when characters were used at all).
Anyway, I’m planning a quick trip to Taiwan in a few weeks. Fortunately I have some friends and family spread around the island who’ve volunteered to help me secure accommodation. Still, in some cases I’m on my own, which means trolling the internet for good hotel reviews, interesting restaurant recommendations and mountains worth climbing. Character sets are one issue. While I can read 繁體 without too much trouble, it’s definitely slower for me than simplified, and it’s much more prone to mistakes. But that’s only one of the problems a mainland expat is going to face in Taiwan. The other, at least online, has to do with Bopomofo and how often it shows up in user-generated content.
Passing notes
I caught two sixth grade girls passing notes in class today (which I think is far better than just chatting and disrupting the class), and they unexpectedly didn’t try to hide the note when I approached them when the class was over.
I was quite surprised at what I saw. I recognized the script, and had long thought it would be perfect for this sort of thing because I haven’t found many people in China who can identify it, let alone read or write it.
Phonemica: a panorama of Chinese
Kellen and I are very excited to announce, first to our Sinoglot friends, the beta launch of an entirely new project* that we hope will be a rich source of scholarship, activity, and (geeky) entertainment for years to come.
Phonemica (乡音苑, xiāngyīnyuàn), to quote the tagline, is “a panorama of Chinese, painted by its speakers through their stories.” In less poetic terms, the website is a group-sourced collection of carefully transcribed, high-quality recordings of both Standard Mandarin (putonghua) and local varieties of Chinese. Continue…
乡音苑, 一幅中国话全景图
3Q
In the earlier post, Shurely Shome Mishtake, I talked about how I came to pronounce the Mandarin sounds, zh, ch, sh too far back in the mouth. This is basically not a good thing. But before moving on to just how those sounds ought to be produced, I’d first like to draw your attention to the Chinese dentals.
Many people will be aware that Chinese students of English initially have considerable difficulty with the two English dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, the ‘th’ sounds in ‘thin’ and ‘then’. Indeed, many Chinese students are very aware of this, and use the humorous Chinglish abbreviation, 3Q (sān – Q = thank you). Continue…
Shurely shome mishtake!
If you’re reading this blog you’ve already heard that Chinese is So Damn Hard, but I sometimes wonder whether we make it more difficult than it need be.
Getting it wrong from the start
One of my clearest memories of those early baby steps in Pinyin was the strange obsession some teachers had with the difference between two groups of easily distinguished sounds:
zhi chi shi
zi ci si
Obviously, these syllables seemed pretty exotic with the so-called vowel represented by the letter ‘i‘ being nothing like any vowel I’d ever heard. But even as I started to make that fricative-cum-vowel, I was regularly reminded that the distinction between the 平舌 (píngshé, flat tongue) and 翘舌 (qiàoshé, cacuminal or retroflex, sometimes called 卷舌, juǎnshé) sounds was terribly important. Continue…
Remodeling at Sinoglot: Email subscriptions are back
For the 1% of readers who actually visit the Sinoglot website, as opposed to you lazy Google reader bastards our valued RSS users.
You might recall that after a break-in several months ago, we decided to move SG headquarters to a more hopeful neighborhood*.
Problem was, in our haste, we left some things behind at the old place, such as email subscriptions. No problem, right? We’ll just have folks resubscribe, as soon as they notice something missing in their life. Great solution, except for the minor issue of having no working email subscription system.
We fought valiantly with the WordPress theme about getting the subscription box to show up, to no avail. So for now, it’s out with the old WordPress theme, and in with, well, the most unimaginative theme available. Yes, thememaster Kellen is going to kill me, but there you go.
However, email subscriptions are up and running again. Just put your address in the box on the top right of the home page and enjoy months of low-cost subscription goodness.
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*WebFaction is the name of our hosting service. So far so good, with appropriate incantations against webhosting’s evil spirits.