Pronuncation of 给予

[Scoobyqueen]

Just listened to Radio Australia news. the reading of 给予 is gei yu rather than ji yu. I am wondering if you can do both or if it indeed should be gei yu.

Context:

我希望我的努力使国家变得更强大，并能给予年轻的一代一个充满机遇的未来

Source

[skylee]

It should be jiyu as far as I know, but people don't always follow rules (consider juese vs jiaose for 角色）.

[imron]

Geiyu is incorrect. Occasionally, a tv/radio presenter will be reading a script and will read this as geiyu instead of jiyu. It happened during the Spring Festival Gala a few years back and the presenter who did it got heavily criticised in the media and on the Internet the following day for making such a basic mistake.

That said, it's basically the same level of mistake as mixing up their, they're, there, your and you're, except in spoken form rather than written.

So, you might not be suprised to see an uneducated person make that sort of mistake, especially say on the Internet, but if you saw a well-known writer in a reputable publication make the same error, you'd probably tut-tut and wonder how editorial standards had slipped so low, and how modern education has failed the younger generation

[Guoke]

给予(jǐyǔ) is easily confused with 给以(gěiyǐ).

The news presenter may have said 给以 instead of 给予.

[Daan]

I've actually heard géiyǔ a few times in Taiwan and asked about it. I was told this pronunciation was substandard, but on the rise among younger speakers. It's probably a bit like 角色, as skylee said.

[songlei]

I have heard both. I suppose it doesn't really matter that much. Mandarin is a big language; people are bound to disagree on these pronunciation issues.

[roddy]

I've also just come across 不给, insufficient, where (according to the ABC) it's also jǐ. Oh, and if you want to be confused, read all about ungelivable

[Lu]

people don't always follow rules (consider juese vs jiaose for 角色）.

About that: in 春, Ba Jin writes 脚色 a few times in the meaning of 'role'. I don't know if that was an older way of saying that word, an editorial mistake, or what.

[skylee]

腳色 is still in use, though not commonly I think. Check the MOE dictionary. Quote:「腳色」亦作「角色」. 唉.

[rezaf]

maybe it's 給與My link

[skylee]

maybe it's 給與My link

I have thought about this too. You might wish to take a look at the Taiwan MOE dictionary (I can't manage to post a permanent link here). The pronunciation of 給與 in the MOE dictionary is still ji3 yu3.

My 現代漢語詞典 also says -

【給予】ji3 yu3（書）給(gei3)：給予幫助 | 給予同情。也作給與。

[daofeishi]

I actually had a funny experience with that word today. I have been working a volunteer teacher with an ESL program in Boston for a while, and today I started with a new group of students, a lovely group of 30-60 year olds who have had little experience with learning English and live their lives centered on Boston Chinatown. I went through the lesson's vocabulary, and there were some groans and humorous remarks about English phonetics when they realized that the "ea"s in "learn" and "teacher" are not the same sound. Just for fun, I went on a short rant on the agony of having to deal with some of the more obscure 多音字 of Chinese. I wrote a 给 on the blackboard and told them that how I had been imprinted with the pronunciation gei3 for it. Then I added an 予 to it, and asked the group what word that is. To my surprise, almost half the class, ten people or so, confidently answered gei3yu3.

[zhwj]

According to the writer Mai Jia (microblog), in the TV adaptation of his latest novel 风语, an actor pronounces 悖论 ("paradox") as bólùn instead of bèilùn, probably by analogy with 脖.

A brief online search shows a number of warnings against this mistaken pronunciation, so it must be somewhat common.