Second tone at the end of a phrase?

[Lanchong]

Does a second tone sometimes behave differently at the end of a phrase? Or do I need to improve my tone recognition?

For example, take this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HaoYXZYNU0#t=205

jia4zhi2 seems to be pronounced jia4zhi0

and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HaoYXZYNU0#t=167

biao3da2 sounds almost like biao3da0 to me.

And yet, at other times, the second tone at the end of the sentence is clear to me, as in 微博: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HaoYXZYNU0#t=193

And he pronounces biao3da2 clearer at another point in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HaoYXZYNU0#t=222

Can anybody help explain this to me?

[zachhoy]

Hi Lanchong. The first video you linked is 20min long, so it took me a minute to find. But yes, the main speaker talks about 'value' a fair amount. From my 8 yrs of living in Beiing, I can say confidently that in spoken Chinese, jiàzhí (价值) truly is often pronounced jiàzhi.

 

There are many variations in spoken Chinese that are not well documented. For example, 质量 should be zhìliàng, but many people actually say zhíliàng. If you call people on it, they might even be stumped and surprised. Some might even deny it at first. But in fact, many people in Northern China say zhíliàng. 

 

Another interesting side note is that where in Mandarin spoken on the mainland (standard Mandarin) will take many second-syllables as neutral, they retain many of the original tones in Taiwanese Mandarin. For example, standard rènshi (认识) would be pronounced rènshí in Taiwan. 

 

Also please keep in mind that while doing public speaking, everybody can shorten sounds and even make slight mistakes. I use TED.com videos for training purposes, and after listening to them many times, I in fact have spotted lots of little blurbs and incomplete sounds, from native English speakers. 

[metal.lunchbox]

I can confirm what's said above. While speakers in different regions may be aware of major tone changes due to dialects, they are unlikely to recognize tone neutralization in their speech. I have heard a number of mainland speakers teach 我们 as wómén with a clear and emphasized second tone on both syllables and then consistently neutralize the second tone in normal speech (wómen). You might call such unstressed syllables. Taiwanese mandarin speakers do not appear to use neutral tones in my experience. A good dictionary should tell you about these neutral-tone syllables, CC-cedict and Pleco do. It's important to know that many two syllable words can have unstressed second syllables, but the pattern isn't consistent. Just keep your ears open and try to imitate native speakers.

 

It's also important to know that tones can be affected by their position in the sentence as you suggest.  Just like other languages, Chinese has sentence-level stress and intonation, so a word which is emphasized in the sentence will likely have both syllables intoned clearly. It sounds like you are on the right track.

[OneEye]

For example, standard rènshi (认识) would be pronounced rènshí in Taiwan.

 

Actually, it's rènshì in Taiwan. And the standard pronunciation of 質 in Taiwan is zhí, so 質量 is indeed zhíliàng.

[tooironic]

I wrote about variant pronunciations in Mandarin on my blog a while back, you may find it useful.

 

It's an interesting topic. The bigger your vocabulary gets, the more you notice there is a notable difference between how words are pinyinised in the dictionary and how they are spoken in real life.

[Altair]

In addition to what tooironic puts on his blog, I can add the following:

 

The unstressed Mandarin neutral tone is probably a result of certain phenomena related to how syllables are stressed.  Beijing Mandarin is a "stress-timed language" and thus a language that tends to determine its rhythms according to how many stresses a sentence has.  The Chinese dialects in the south seem generally to be syllable-timed languages, where word stress plays no part in determining rhythm and thus unstressed "neutral tones" don't have much of a place.  The standard Mandarin spoken by many such people seems to have been influenced by this and thus has created a secondary Mandarin standard that tends to eliminate as many neutral tones as possible.

 

The Taiwanese Mandarin standard was apparently based on the elite speech of Nanjing Mandarin speakers.   (Nanjing was the capital of China before the Communist takeover).  It was thus slightly different from the speech of the Beijing elite and was standardized slightly earlier.  I think there was also a slight difference in emphasis, so that the Taiwanese government leaned more toward maintaining literary continuity and the Mainland government leaned more toward adopting popular speech variants.

 

Another source of difference is the persistence of literary pronunciations versus colloquial pronunciations.  Two characters that exhibit this split are 皿(xuè vs. xuě or xiě) and 薄 (báo vs. bó).  People can disagree as to what is a literary compound and what is a colloquial compound: for example, 轻薄 qīngbáo vs. qīngbó.  Sometimes, the literary pronunciation was limited to a particular usage, such as transitive vs. intransitive, and one of the two has become obsolete--e.g., 王 (wàng vs. wáng) and 治 (chǐ vs. zhì)--, but only for some speakers--e.g., 尽 (jǐn vs. jìn).

 

Yet another source of difference is that three of the four tones of Middle Chinese have rather clear lines of descent leading to the four tones of standard Mandarin if you account for changes in the pronunciation of initial consonants.  Thus, three old tones led to four new ones.  One of the four Middle Chinese tones (the "Entering Tone") was, however, distributed among the four current tones of standard Mandarin in a largely random fashion.  Thus, one additional old tone led to the same four new ones.  Often, such words/characters have variant pronunciations, and only some of these are listed in dictionaries.  An example of one of these entering tone descendants is 裂 (liě vs. liè).  This random distribution of modern tones may also explain some of the differences between Taiwanese and Mainland Mandarin in such words as  发 (fǎ vs. fà) in the meanings "hair" or "France."  The standards seem to have simply settled on different variations of what was originally a word pronounced with a single "entering tone."

[skylee]

皿(xuè vs. xuě or xiě)

It should be 血 in the post above, not 皿.

This random distribution of modern tones may also explain some of the differences between Taiwanese and Mainland Mandarin in such words as 发 (fǎ vs. fà) in the meanings "hair" or "France."

First, they are not the same character (not even in simplified). One is 髮, the other is 法. Second, you may wish to note that according to the MOE Dictionary, fa4 for France is now regarded as 舊音.

[zachhoy]

Actually, it's rènshì in Taiwan. And the standard pronunciation of 質 in Taiwan is zhí, so 質量 is indeed zhíliàng.

 

Thanks OneEye, I had mistaken that with 常识, which is pronounced chángshí in mainland but chángshì in Taiwan. I live in Beijing, but I have a good friend in Taiwan who's been inadvertently teaching me the variations.