Running into new pinyin syllables, and "给"

[muirm]

It always surprises/humbles me when I run into a new pinyin syllable. I'll be reading along, thinking I'm a hotshot, and then I come across a pinyin syllable I have never seen before. Granted it has happened less and less over the years, but I just ran into "剖" (pōu) a month or so ago. And then I think: what kind of hotshot can I be if I haven't even encountered all the relatively commonly used pinyin syllables? Some other ones I remember from before are "拴“ (shuān) and "炯" (jiǒng). Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Now onto a real question involving a rare syllable (rare in the sense that only one character uses it): 给. I've always assumed there was something special with 给 to be the only character to carry that pronunciation. I was looking around and I found some discussions saying "gei" was closer to the old pronunciation, and "ji" (as it is read in some compounds) should be the correct modern pronunciation, but I couldn't find any complete explanations. My question is: is this explanation correct, and if so why did this character end up maintaining an old pronunciation? Are there other examples of common characters that for whatever reason didn't undergo pronunciation evolution?

[WestTexas]

I remember finding the pronunciation of 虐 and 拽 novel when I first learned them.

[siledouyaoai]

I remember last time I went through a pinyin table being surprised to find kei (尅) and rua (挼). Perhaps they're more often used in dialect though.

[Michaelyus]

Regarding 給:

I know jǐ is the 'regular' pronunciation, hence its use in traditional recitation as well as in the more 'formal' compounds (I would definitely say that's a literary vs colloquial reading thing in Mandarin). Baxter gives a Middle Chinese pronunciation of *kip, homophonous to 急、汲、級; in Mandarin, *ki- underwent palatalisation, e.g. 基、京. In the case of gěi, it escaped the palatalisation but had some kind of vowel change. At least the loss of the final -p produced the same reassigned tone!

[Iriya]

Another interesting one is 茄 (qie2)

Historically, it only had one reading, 'ga' (which obviously got changed to 'jia' in Mandarin). But where does the qie reading come from? 番茄 is pronounced 'fe ga' in Shanghainese.

[siledouyaoai]

I don't know much about this, but perhaps in some areas 茄 was pronounced 'jia'. I think 家 is pronounced jie in some Sichuan and Yunnan dialects, so maybe it wasn't too far to go from jie to qie. That is a bit of a wild guess though.

[Michaelyus]

According to the online dictionary from Baxter, 茄 had two readings in Middle Chinese: *gja and *kæ. So 茄 as qié​ is also regular. For *gja, in 平声; voicing loss in this Middle Chinese tone gives rise to Mandarin 2nd tone 阳平声 with an aspirated initial (hence the rule that if you see Pinyin b-, d-, g-, j- in 2nd tone, it's likely to be a 入声 reassignment). The final *-ja regularly becomes Pinyin -ie, apparently (although my grasp of vowel changes is not that great).

[David Wong]

I find it interesting that some of the rarer syllables take on the -ei form. For example, 得 (dei3), 黑(hei1), 这 (zhei4), 贼 (zei2), 谁 (shei2). All of which happen to be quite common words.

[Iriya]

I always thought that zhei (这) and nei (那) were simply contractions of 这一 and 那一 respectively.

[David Wong]

Well, it's not incorrect to say 这三本书, with a zhei sound.

[Iriya]

Never heard it.

[OneEye]

Heard one today that reminded me of this thread: 嫩 nèn, meaning tender (as in meat)

[li3wei1]

I've recently run in to 囊 náng, a pocket or bag for money.

[imron]

Speaking of nèn, there's also 恁, which is similar in meaning to "那“ or ”那么“. 金庸 likes to use this word a lot.

[Lu]

I had exactly that experience with 拴. Something like seven years of Chinese and I had never heard this one. Didn't even believe the teacher at first (she was right of course, duh).

Was transliterating some names a while ago and found that there is only one character for tei: 忒. Mainly used in transliterating ancient Greek names, so in the end I decided against using it in a contemporary Dutch name.

[Michaelyus]

欻 (with a variant form 歘) chuā​; apparently onomatopoeic.

[winnerin2009]

Your first question, if you know some 音韵学 (meaning Chinese sounds and its tones), you will know that there was not "j", "q", "x" sounds in ancient Chinese, All the characters sound with these 3 consonants were derived from "g","k", and "h". So do 给, At the very beginning (in 《说文解字》), 给 may sound like “gi” (居立切), and the origin meaning is "to fulfill" or "to complete" (相足也).

Second question, there're a lot of factors taking effects on the variation of sound in Chinese. And even sometimes they didn't use same character. For example, have you met some places called "X各庄"？Like 史各庄，赵各庄 and so on. In fact. the "各" is "家". I said before that there's no "j" sound in ancient, so "家" sounds like "ga" which sounds like "各" in ancient Chinese. When coming into modern, the sound of 家 change into "jia", but when it used in places names it didn't change, The modern people therefore changed “X家庄” into "X各庄". But not all the "X家庄" made such change, some people just changed the pronunciation but not the character, like 石家庄（Shijiazhuang. not Shigezhuang）.

[外国赤佬]

This is called palatalization, and it is indeed specific to Modern Mandarin. Most (all?) other dialects lack it.

As for 給, it was pronounced /gyip/ (with a 入聲), during the Tang era.

[anonymoose]

参差 cēncī

[Michaelyus]

Ehm, some phonemes that start with j, q, x in Modern Standard Mandarin came from 齒頭 initials in Middle Chinese, corresponding to alveolar affricates /ts/, /tsʰ/, /dz/, /s/ as the characters 精、清、從、心 were respectively pronounced. Not all of them came from palatalisation of velar initials 見、溪、羣、曉.

Unless one is specifically talking about Standard 京剧 Mandarin, a preserved 中原-based Mandarin, which does have a distinction between alveolar affricates [尖音] and palatal affricates [团音], with the palatal affricates coming as far as I know exclusively from Middle Chinese velars.

Yes, most Mandarin dialects did undergo palatalisation of velars fairly recently (some more recently than others: I found a study that said that 南京 was in the midst of palatalising its velars at the turn of the 20th century) though it's only one of the defining features of Mandarin. But many Wu 吳 and Gan 贛 varieties have gone through velar palatalisation too. Many Mandarin dialects developed a colloquial/literary split along the lines of 給, colloquial unpalatalised. Some apparently didn't palatalise at all (or haven't yet...), e.g. Northwestern Mandarin (rumours of eastern Shandong as well on Wikipedia).

And earlier on, there was a wave of selective velar palatalisation when Middle Chinese emerged from Old Chinese, which the Min family (and apparently some Hakka too, although that might be due to language contact afterward) did not participate in. Characters like 枝、齒 are meant to have been affected.