Glottal stops and nasal vowels?

[djwebb2004]

I'm sure some people will rush to tell me I am wrong, but I have a theory that Chinese pronunciation includes glottal stops and nasal vowels, but whenever I try to raise this with Chinese, they always say no, but I think they don't understand the question. In 骄傲 jiao'ao, I am convinced there is a glottal stop between the syllables, just as there is in cockney english in the middle of "butter". Also very often a final "n" is not pronounced, but the preceding vowel is nasalised. I am listening to the song "知道我在等你吗？" and the singer pronounces the word 原因 without actually pronouncing either n fully. I know the offical putonghua pronunciation textbooks do not mention glottal stops and nasalised vowels. But does anyone agree with me?

[HashiriKata]

I know the offical putonghua pronunciation textbooks do not mention glottal stops and nasalised vowels. But does anyone agree with me?

Yes, I do. I've never checked them out but I think they're more or less natural phonetic phenomena, regardless of the language in question.

1. When you enunciate 2 vowels adjacent to each other, you tend to insert a glottal stop to separate them. Try asking a few Mandarin speakers to say the sentence below in normal speed and observe their pronouncing of 骄傲:

"我们英国人的小骄傲很不少." ( )

2. When singing, you tend to exaggerate vowels and reduce the quality of consonants, and nasal sounds such as "n" can change quite significantly to facilitate singing. Try listening to 原因 in normal speech instead and see if you can spot any difference.

Cheers,

[PollyWaffle]

does anyone agree with me?

yep! but i am an expert in nothing, other than malingering

[taibeihong]

I agree with you in part regarding the nasal vowels. When I started studying Chinese, I noticed that final "n" didn't quite sound like final "n" in Spanish (at least as spoken in Mexico City), English, Italian and other languages, it sounded like too "faint". Then I payed very close attention to how my teacher's mouth looked like when he pronounced words like "kàn", where the mouth ends rather open thanks to the "a" sound, and I noticed that the tongue, instead of finishing in the roof of the mouth (either at the upper teeth, as in Russian, or somwhere behind that, as in Spanish/English) it finished touching the lower teeth! So, technically, the vowel is not being nasalised, there is an "n" sound alright, but it's pronounced in such a way that for most speakers of Western languages it sounds too soft and sort of like a nasalisation of the previous vowel. My teacher was from Beijing, and when I later went to live in Beijing I noticed the same phenomenon. I don't know if speakers from other dialect areas do it the same way, though, but I'm pretty sure about this one with Putonghua speakers from Beijing.

[carlo]

As far as I know the only nasal sounds with contrastive properties in 普通话 occur in words such as 帮儿 /pa~R/. This is distinct from 班儿 /paR/ (without nasal quality). Apparently this distinction is more often found among older Beijing speakers.

Even without r-hua, in words ending in -n or -ng, the soft palate tends to lower early (anticipating the nasal consonant) so that the preceding vowel takes a nasal quality. This happens in all languages, including English. But it only has a 'colouring' effect, doesn't change meaning.

(There are many Chinese dialects that have plenty of nasal vowels, so some people speak Mandarin through their noses - but that's another story).

On the other hand, I can't really hear the difference between lower teeth and upper teeth nasals. They sound virtually identical to me (the shape of the mouth is the same).

Right before a vowel （like the -ao in 骄傲的傲） the vocal folds have to contract and then release. When this process produces an audible sound, it's called a glottal stop. So if the -a in 傲 is given some emphasis (more volume, stronger contraction) you'll sometimes hear a glottal stop /tCiau?au/. However, it doesn't affect the meaning. Like English 'you are *Chinese*' vs. 'you ?*are* Chinese' (after all), glottal stops can be used for emphasis.