Syllables, tones and graphs: Megamix!

[Gharial]

Or: Heteromonic Graphoginandtonics. (WARNING: You might need a stiff drink after reading this post!).

I'm basically wondering if there are easier/clearer/more succinct ways (in the Chinese linguistics literature?) to describe certain syllables than the terms I've so far come up with:

'Heterographic monotone', e.g. ce4 = 测 厕 侧 策 册 etc. (There is no ce1-3 or 0, as far as I am aware).

'Monographic tone', e.g. bai2 = 白 (and 白 only). (There are other tones/suprasegmentals for the general syllable 'bai' however, each of which may have multiple characters/graphs).

'Monographic monotone', e.g. chua1 = 欻, and there are no other tones associated with this syllable, or characters with its only tone (they are thus both unique, in an exact 1-to-1 correspondence/match).

A related question is, do you think that the order (from topmost down) of the above three term-categories is correct in terms (logically speaking) of being "harder" > "easier" to learn?

I am basing the above examples by the way ultimately on an old edition of the Commercial Press' Han-Ying Cidian (ed. Wu Jing-Rong), particularly its 'Index of Syllables of Hanyupinyin' (pp26-31), which would seem comprehensive enough for most practical purposes.

The reason I am looking at this sort of stuff is that I am interested in anything that could conceivably help chip away at (and therefore reduce, however slightly) the apparent learning load of those studying Chinese!:)

[roddy]

The reason I am looking at this sort of stuff is that I am interested in anything that could conceivably help chip away at (and therefore reduce, however slightly) the apparent learning load of those studying Chinese!

Also known as the 'hopefully searching for patterns' stage of Chinese learning, I'm afraid. Any you do find are going to be so trivial or so laden with exceptions that you may as well get on with learning the things.

Alternatively, write a book. "Simply learn these 900 rules, 500 supplementary additions, 450 corollaries and 200 conventions and YOU TOO will immediately be able to read the 2150 most common Chinese characters!"

[chrix]

Terms like those proposed by you don't exist because it would depend on the dictionary you use, a "monographic monotone" according to one dictionary could very well not be one according to another. Though I do think you could run some statistical analyses on how the tones are distributed across the lexicon, but I'm certain people have already done it.

But you can take one of the most important sound changes of Chinese as a rule of thumb: the loss of voiced obstruents. So now, with the exception of certain 入聲 characters, all characters in the first tone were from characters that were voiceless and 平聲 in Middle Chinese, if they were voiced, they became second tone (have a look at this chart). As there are no voiceless liquids in Chinese (unlike say, Burmese), there will not be any characters in the first tone with a liquid, i.e. starting with n, m, l or r.

Exceptions to this rule are:

- onomatopoetic words or particles

- 入聲 characters (I think 拉 falls under this as it can be laap6 in Cantonese, but confusingly enough it can also be read laai, and is ra in Japanese, and is not included in Schuessler's etymological dictionary)

- a constituent of a bisyllabic morpheme -> these are usually loans!

- only came into the language after the sound change occurred

By and large a robust rule. If it helps learners much, I cannot say, you be the judge of that..

[Gharial]

Thanks for the reply, info and link, Chrix (although it may all be a bit over most learners' heads - I know it's a bit over mine!).

And Hi Roddy, and thanks for having me on this great site! I'm not sure though that knowing that the syllable chua for example only occurs in the first tone and then with only one, relatively infrequent character representing it, or that bai in the second tone equates to only one character/meaning (though this time a pretty frequent one) is such trivial or exception-laden information - I'd much prefer to have a comprehensive table of the sounds of Putonghua/Mandarin Chinese that indicated little things like this than to have a seemingly random partial sampling of syllables (or rather, more just the initials and finals) and tones (e.g. the old ma in all five tones as "tone practice", that seems common in thinnish textbooks), and I'm sure that quite a few learners would like to be able to effectively check/cross off the apparently "really useless" items ASAP! (So the table I'm envisaging will have all the syllables, and a representative character assigned to it, with notes as appropriate regarding frequency etc). Even though there may only be in total a dozen or so syllable(-tone(-character))s that are easily memorizable (or indeed not really worth worrying about at all in some cases), it's a start of sorts, surely? (Or could be a reference point - though I myself hesitate to say one that valuable - for a student to come back to sometime later at least).

Anyway, I might post a small sampling on here at some point of the materials I'm writing, if that would be alright, to see what people make of it, though for anyone who's studied Chinese beyond beginner level, it might not seem like much (but the question then to my mind however is still, are beginner materials generally good, detailed or sophisticated enough [within reason] to provide a strong basis? I mean, I can hear the ex-used car salesman now, shouting 'Would you have liked to have a course like this when you were first starting Chinese? Indeed, would you still like to have a course like this, considering that the one you used may have left something to be desired?' etc etc:mrgreen:).

Edited February 4, 2010 at 06:53 PM by Gharial

[chrix]

Well, the version for beginners would be "generally speaking there are no 'real' characters starting with l, m, n, r in the first tone", the most important exception being 拉 (and some other rusheng characters).

I'm not sure if beginners would be helped by a frequency table, I see the same problem with the Six Principles of hanzi. I still believe teaching the Six Principles will help beginners a lot, but only after they already have a couple hundred characters under their belt. I mean for beginners it's already hard enough to grasp the concept of tones, so that's what they need to concentrate on first. I don't see an advantage for them if they're able to tick off certain tone-syllable combinations, because the way tones are usually taught to beginners is that you are to be able to pronounce any string of segments in any of the four tones + the neutral one. Conceptually this makes sense to me.

That said: people have always shared their material here, for me this is one of the things that make this site so great... So post away

Edited January 29, 2010 at 02:01 PM by chrix

[renzhe]

or that bai can 100% be assigned second tone and again as only one character

I'm not sure if I understand correctly.

bái (with second tone) is always 白

But bai can certainly have other tones, like bǎi (百, 摆, 柏 ...) or bài (败, 拜 ...), which are all very common.

[Gharial]

Thanks Chrix! Actually I'm still working on the more "pronunciation/learner alphabet-related" bits, though I could let you have a peek at the more "character/native orthography-related" half (I like the thought of the pronunciation and character-related halves of an 'Essentials of Mandarin Chinese' thingy forming two nice juicy bookends to any Pinyin-based course on the market - I'm not out to teach much about the actual language, just provide a few tips to get people to the point where they can begin immersing themselves in it hopefully more comfortably and profitably as a result). Anyway, I'll stick whatever bits on this here thread sometime reasonably soon, so keep yer eyes peeled!

[Gharial]

Hi Renzhe! Thanks for pointing out the bad phrasing in my reply to Roddy. (I'd myself realized I had to improve the wording of at least my first post in this thread - witness its "There are other tones/suprasegmentals for the general syllable 'bai' however, each of which may have multiple characters/graphs", basically similar to what you went on to point out, thanks though, by the way! - but I must've rather switched off whilst composing, and then forgotten about improving, the wording of the reply to Roddy, which unfortunately remained a bit wooly for a while there! Anyway, I've edited/changed the bit in the latter post that made no sense and that you quoted, so things should hopefully all read better now, even if the 'monographic tone' faux-terminology still doesn't help much! Sorry once again).

Edited February 4, 2010 at 10:55 PM by Gharial

[valikor]

This seems like an almost-relevant place to post something that I have been thinking about. always find it interesting when a particular sound maps to only one character (especially if it's regardless of tones). Here are some that I've found. (Maybe some are wrong... sogou piynyin finds 3 nengs, for example, but I checked a dictionary and couldn't find them)

给

日

能

嗲

诶

佛

咯

I doubt it has any practical application, but I find it entertaining at least. I don't know why they have like 65 xing characters (according to sogoupinyin) but only one "gei" (2 if you count the traditional one)

OP: I guess I don't know about the practical application of your project.... it might be helpful, it might not. But, I think it's still cool

[chrix]

you should also give the pronunciations because almost all of your characters are 破音字, which would at least preclude bi-uniqueness.

Also, 嗲 is "dialectal", some of them are also primarily used onomatopoetically and in case of 日, it's only a case of what kind of dictionary you have, mine has 馹 meaning "post-chaise"...

Edited January 30, 2010 at 03:23 PM by chrix

[Daan]

chrix, a thought occurred to me today on 拉's pronunciation in Mandarin. You're right one would expect a fourth tone on this word, and when pondering this problem a dustbin suddenly caught my gaze. And what did that dustbin say? 垃圾桶, pronounced in Beijing as lājītǒng, but which is pronounced as lèsètǒng in relatively conservative southern Mandarin. So the rule about 入聲 syllables having a fourth tone in (conservative) Mandarin would still hold.

I honestly wouldn't dare venture a guess as to why Pekinese Mandarin has lā instead of lè, but if you look at the data for Cantonese, there seems to be a similar distinction there. According to my 中華 dictionary, Cantonese has lap6 for 垃. What Cantonese pronunciation does your dictionary give for 垃? Putting the data we have so far together, we have:

拉 BJ lā TW lā CNT lap6 / lai6

垃 BJ lā TW lè CNT lap6

I think the first-tone readings in Mandarin are equivalent to the Cantonese lai6 pronunciation, while the Taiwanese Mandarin form lè is Cantonese lap6. Unless 拉 was pronounced as lè in conservative Mandarin, you would almost be led to believe something strange was going on in Middle Chinese with the 入聲 of forms now pronounced as lā in BJ. And even if 拉 also has a conservative reading of lè, you can still wonder how the Pekinese Mandarin form changed from lè into lā. Also, where did the Cantonese form lai6 come from?

But I'll readily admit my knowledge of the evolution of the Chinese languages after Middle Chinese isn't what it should be, so if this makes no sense, please let me know. I would be happy to stand corrected, as always

[chrix]

Too bad I don't have a copy of Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese Dictionary lying around here, but I think since 拉 is a frequently used word, it is not totally out of the ordinary for it to undergo irregular sound change... 垃圾 is also an interesting case, the fourth tone is indeed what you would expect given the phonetic component (which is 入聲 too, so I think we just need to file 拉 away as an exception)...

[Gharial]

Hi Valikor! With the exception of 诶 ēi, all the characters in your list are among the apparently 'only 23 syllables in the lexicon which happen to have no homophonic characters' that Yip Po-Ching gives on pg 56 of his The Chinese Lexicon (a page which is previewable on Google Book Search as I'm typing this). Just in case you're interested (which I guess you will be!). Thanks by the way for thinking my deranged ramblings 'cool'!

Edited January 30, 2010 at 06:10 PM by Gharial

[skylee]

拉 BJ lā TW lā CNT lap6 / lai6

I don't think I have ever heard 拉 pronounced as lap6 or lai6 in Cantonese. To me it is always lai1. But then I am not as well learned as you guys.

[Daan]

That's interesting, skylee. I don't speak Cantonese at all and am merely relying on a dictionary, so thanks for chiming in. I suppose that means that the form underwent a change similar to the one in Beijing Mandarin. How about 垃?

[Gharial]

OK, here's the sample I promised Chrix of some of the stuff I've been working on.

It's a supplement (re. the Oxford Chinese Dictionary's radicals) to a bigger set of material that teaches the details of Chinese character-based orthography in a stroke > radical > character build-up, with a central aim of increasing dictionary look-up skills and general visual awareness. The protypical dictionary is taken to be the OCD, so the material could in a way be viewed as a learner handbook and set of exercises to that, though enough comparisons are made and drawn with other dictionaries and radical systems that a learner familiar with the OCD's (courtesy of my materials) should be able to pick up and quite easily use really any Chinese-English reference book.

I don't want to give away too much here (cos I'd like to think the material has some possible selling points e.g. the comprehensive explanations and exercises etc that get the student to divide, [re-]order and draw strokes, radicals and characters as a means of getting better at identifying their composition and certainly dictionary organization). One component part I'm definitely quite pleased with is the CASS < > Kangxi conversion chart I've designed (visually completely two-way, and on only two pages, unlike e.g. the ABC dictionary's conversion material) that will allow easy conversion between the two systems and one to learn the remaining Kangxi-unique radicals very easily. (I know the ABC Comprehensive has switched to using the Kangxi radicals rather than the CASS, but most western learners will be using simplified radical systems/dictionaries based on the CASS 189 system still for probably quite a while into their studies).

Like I said, I'm currently still working on the "pronunciation/Pinyin learner alphabet-related" half/accompaniment/lead-in to this "character/native orthography-related" half of an "Essentials" package, but I'm hoping that it will include a similar level of presumably useful detail.

Anyway, any comments or advice would be very welcome!

Edited January 30, 2010 at 11:13 PM by Gharial

[Hofmann]

For those interested, there's a bigger tone table here.

Here's my take on 垃圾. I can't find 反切 for these, so this is only based on Cantonese. In Cantonese they are pronounced /laap6 saap3/, which is 陽入 and 下陰入. It seems that the Taiwan Mandarin /le4 se4/ is more conservative in tones, while the Beijing Mandarin /la1 ji1/ is more conservative in finals. 拉 was only 盧合切 in Middle Chinese, which means it only has 入聲. The Cantonese /laai1/ is probably a case of irregular evolution, with /lap6/ being what one would expect. Mandarin /la1/ is also irregular, but only in the tone (I think one would expect /la4/). Nevermind. It isn't irregular. Most 盧合切 characters in 廣韻 are /la1/ in Mandarin. In general, though, whenever a character can be read with a 入聲 or a descending diphthong in Cantonese, the 入聲 corresponds to a pure final or ascending diphthong and the descending diphthong corresponds to a descending diphthong in Mandarin.

Edited January 30, 2010 at 08:46 PM by Hofmann

[Gharial]

Another question: would you quibble with 鬥 > 斗 (dou4) being generally described as an instance of 'homophonic substitution' (from 斗 dou3) similar to that of 穀 > 谷 (both gu3)? Or should the difference in tone really rule out using the notion of homophony (even roughly)?

[chrix]

maybe you should first give us an exact definition of what you mean by that...

斗 is dou3, while 鬥 is dou4. Also for some meanings, there is overlap between 逗 and 鬥, so it's not as clear-cut as for 谷 and 穀...

[Gharial]

Chrix, I thought my question was pretty clear. I'm willing to believe that the answer may well not be, however!