Phonemica - a fangyan archive

[roddy]

Phonemica will no doubt be of interest to some of you - basically it's a volunteer-sourced project to record however many fangyan. There are plenty of ways to get involved - listen, help transcribe, head out and record someone local, post online about how there's no way that's an authentic speaker of Lower Yangtze Mandarin, etc.

I'm not sure how complete it is at the moment, but there are enough recordings to have a click round and listen to a few different ones.

WSJ article here and I owe a hat-tip to that O'Kane fellow.

[tooironic]

It's a shame new pieces haven't been uploaded in a while, even after that WSJ article. I think the site has massive potential. I hope it can keep growing, and continue cataloguing an even wider range of Chinese languages.

[Kenny同志]

I think many Chinese would be very interested in taking part in the mammoth project. The problem is that few of us know its existence.

[abcdefg]

I see nothing there from Yunnan. Maybe I can find one or two local friends to help remedy that.

[Angelina]

No Chaoshanhua?

Great project. I'll try to post links about it.

[liuzhou]

I owe a hat-tip to that O'Kane fellow.

I mentioned this on another thread weeks ago. No one was interested.

[Kobo-Daishi]

It seems they have achieved the $4,175 crowd-funding goal and then some that they were hoping for at Indiegogo.

http://www.indiegogo...jects/phonemica

And they do have 50 recordings available to listen to at their site.

http://phonemica.net/browse

Though, it appears the vast majority of the recordings are Mandarin dialects.

Am quite surprised that there are so few Cantonese recordings. Only 4 out of the 50.

And equally surprising is that there are only 3 Taiwanese Minnan and 1 Fujian Minnan. Thought there'd be a lot more seeing as the crowd-funding page says that their community is based in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

The vast majority of the recordings are incomplete in that the characters, Mandarin, IPA, English and/or Romanization fields need work or are non-existant.

You need to register to view some of the recordings.

Don't know how helpful having 500 recordings of short stories in various dialects/regionolects/topolects/languages will be?

What is the purpose of the exercise? Surely, not to teach to speak any one of them?

To preserve a recorded record for posterity?

Kobo.

[roddy]

The purpose of the exercise is described on the 'About' page of their website.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Roddy wrote:

The purpose of the exercise is described on the 'About' page of their website.

Oh.

[liuzhou]

Though, it appears the vast majority of the recordings are Mandarin dialects.

Am quite surprised that there are so few Cantonese recordings. Only 4 out of the 50.

Why surprised? At 8% Cantonese is probably over-represented. Approximately 4% of Chinese people in China speak it. (http://www.ethnologue.com/country/CN/languages)

[abcdefg]

I've listened to six or eight of the recordings and most of the people I heard were gifted raconteurs, especially the retired lady doctor from Beijing. She could really hold my attention.

I asked a local friend today if she would make a recording for them using her native Yunnan Jianshui 云南建水 hill country dialect. She declined after I showed her the writeup of what they were looking for. She said she wasn't a very good storyteller. "Maybe my grandmother could have done it, but she's no longer around."

If there were an option to just read or recite something simple, mundane and not particularly "creative," they would probably get many more participants. Not sure whether or not that would defeat the purpose as described in the website's "About" section. As it is, they want people who are almost voice actors as well as just speakers of a specific dialect.

[Angelina]

The methodology is nothing new, linguists have been using it for a while.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_history

This project is useful because it has neatly packed everything and put it online.

I didn't really like the retired lady doctor, because she said that all those peasants looked the same to her.

[Angelina]

You can get your friend record for http://www.forvo.com

[Kobo-Daishi]

Liuzhou wrote:

Though, it appears the vast majority of the recordings are Mandarin dialects.

Am quite surprised that there are so few Cantonese recordings. Only 4 out of the 50.

Why surprised? At 8% Cantonese is probably over-represented. Approximately 4% of Chinese people in China speak it. (http://www.ethnologu...ry/CN/languages)

I'm surprised not because of the correspondence between ratio of recordings to the ratio of speakers, but, because the Cantonese are in a more purely Cantonese environment than the other dialects.

I know the people behind the project want to record older speakers because their speech is probably purer than the young who receive their schooling in Mandarin. Not so much Mandarin creeping into their speech.

There is so much media in Cantonese out of Hong Kong, television, radio, movies. Hong Kongers are immersed in a Cantonese environment. They don't go to school where they're taught in Mandarin, go home to watch the news in Mandarin, etc. Not like on the mainland. Though I do believe a lot of people in Guangdong have satellite dishes to receive HK TV, but, they're still taught Mandarin in school.

I'd have thought that there'd be plenty of Cantonese people raring to be recorded and the total quota for Cantonese would have been filled by now. They say they're hoping for 500 recordings by next year. so, 4% would be 20 recordings for Cantonese.

Ditto for Taiwanese Minnan. Though to a lesser extent. Schooling is in Mandarin and most TV, radio and movies are in Mandarin.. But they do have Taiwanese Minnan television and radio available. And the occassional Minnan movie.

Whereas all the other dialects other than Mandarin don't have such resources available to them. No Shanghainese TV, radio, movies, etc. No Gan media.

I guess, I'm like those Cantonese people who think Cantonese is a bigger dialect than it is.

Kobo.

[Lu]

If there were an option to just read or recite something simple, mundane and not particularly "creative," they would probably get many more participants. Not sure whether or not that would defeat the purpose as described in the website's "About" section. As it is, they want people who are almost voice actors as well as just speakers of a specific dialect.

On one hand it would probably be easier to get recordings if the speaker could also just tell that they went to the supermarket that morning and then to the bank. On the other hand, surely virtually everyone will have some kind of story to tell. Even if it's not about painful times in recent history or heartbreaking tales of suffering, anyone can tell something halfway interesting about their favourite aunt or something funny that happened in school one time or their hobby. Unless I'm misunderstanding the purpose, this project is mainly about language, right, not about oral history?

[abcdefg]

#15 -- Guess I just need to try harder and find other dialect speakers. One might be willing to give it a go.

[abcdefg]

#12 --

I didn't really like the retired lady doctor, because she said that all those peasants looked the same to her.

I heard that and thought it was pretty funny because it was so imprudent and so politically incorrect.

[knickherboots]

Looks like a great site worth supporting.