Phonetics of Modern Standard Mandarin (普通话)

[eddyf]

Well then, if you want to tell me that "i"'s (since we're talking about this case) different sounds (and there are more than just the 机, 资，知) are not related and there is no change in that, well, I am not the one to convince you. What I can assure you, though, is that there is relation and there is change. The same goes for "o, a, e". As that same teacher said: "If we haven't heard about something, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist." Thanks for your encouragement and best of luck to you too!

 

I really don't get why the "i"s in 机 and 资 should be expected to have anything to do with each other. In Wade-Giles for example, 资 isn't even written with an "i", it's written tzu. Pinyin was designed in the 1950s and the choice to use the same Roman letter in the syllables "ji" and "zi" was arbitrary and could have been completely due to convenience as far as I can tell. It sounds like you're implying that the use of the same Roman letter was motivated by some sort of phonetic etymology but I don't think it was. Or do you know of some source that says otherwise?

[Angelina]

Pinyin had a bumpy ride, it took decades and major political struggles to achieve the consensus.

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/DeFr1950.html

http://www.pinyin.info/romanization/sinwenz/index.html

I think the i in 机 and the i in 资 should not be there, pinyin is not phonetic enough, there should be better ways to represent spoken Mandarin where the same symbol (i) is not being used to represent different phonemes. I guess OP wants to work in that direction.

[BanZhiYun]

Okay, so from what I read about Wade-Giles (just now, 它是1867年开始的，由英国人威妥玛（Thomas Francis Wade 1818年—1895年，今天的习惯应该翻译成托玛斯·韦德）与人合编的注音规则，叫“威氏拼音”) it's written by a foreigner. I forgot to mention, but I tend to lean on Chinese scholar's academic works, transcriptions and what not, when it comes to Chinese phonetics. As you can see on the pictures I've attached, "i" being a monophthong itself describes 3 sounds. The Chinese themselves call the 资/知 "-i" "zc组, zhch组" or call this "-i" a 舌尖元音。If we have to use IPA to describe it, it would be  [ɨ]. If you can read the Vowel Diagram, you will see that and [ɨ] are both 高，不圆唇音 (I guess that's called Close, Unrounded vowels in English?) Basically there are quite some rules when 制定《汉语拼音方案》。After all, it is a transcription on Chinese sounds, so of course it's trying to relate the 字符 it uses with the sounds. It's trying to be as close as possible, but since it's not a Phonetic transcription, that's quite hard to achieve, thus sometimes it uses same symbols for different sounds, who are somehow related.

[Angelina]

BTW

yes, you can use Praat on a Mac

[BanZhiYun]

In short, our teacher believes that 注音字母 was much better designed to show all the sounds in Chinese, but it's difficulty was that it was like a different set of characters. While, Pinyin uses romanized letters, making it much easier to handwrite (as she says, no one back then was expecting computers would be so wildly used today, so they had to consider handwriting at the time. That's why in pinyin we write "ong" when the sound is [ʊŋ]) In short, I really do think it's a good idea to buy a textbook on 现代汉语, it should have most of the information there. In our textbook we also have the part on 《汉语拼音方案》and 《国际音标》。 If you want, I could take screen of what they say about it.

[BanZhiYun]

@Angelina Yay! I will try to install it these days then. (For some reason I don't know how to quote people here, lol)

[Shelley]

For some reason I don't know how to quote people here,

 

 

Copy want you want to quote and paste in the reply box, highlight it and click the speech bubble icon.

[Geiko]

As others have said before, the fact that different sounds are written with the same letter "i" in pinyin is arbitrary. If you don't like the example of Wade-Giles because it was written by a foreigner, then you can have a look at 注音字母 (which your teacher seems to like): the "i" is 一 in words like 逆 (ㄋㄧˋ, nì), but not in zhi/chi/shi/si/ri... 資 (ㄗ, zī); 知 (ㄓ, zhī); 死 (ㄙˇ, sǐ). 

[BanZhiYun]

The romanization in your example in brackets is pinyin, so yeah. To put it simply, giving an example for “注音字母", which examples uses pinyin to prove a point, is not exactly valid. So we're back to Pinyin and it being "arbitrary". I am not the one to prove you it's not, but just by your post, it's obvious maybe you are not exactly sure which one is 注音字母, which one is 拼音. So I am not exactly sure if you've had a class on chinese phonetics run by chinese phoneticist to be proclaiming whether Pinyin's rules are arbitrary or not.

[BanZhiYun]

1932年，在“编定《国音常用字汇》特组会议”时决定，为了说明上的方便，添补一个注音符号“帀”，作为“ㄓ”、“ㄔ”、“ㄕ”、“ㄖ”、“ㄗ”、“ㄘ”、“ㄙ”7个声母单独成音节时的省略韵母（即虚母）。Surprisingly enough, within these, “ㄓ”、“ㄔ”、“ㄕ”、“ㄖ” are representing "zh, ch, sh, r" in Pinyin; “ㄗ”、“ㄘ”、“ㄙ” are representing "z, c, s".

[Michaelyus]

There is plenty of rationale for "-i" representing the final vowel of 资 and 之, both from a historical point of view and from a comparative point of view. In the Guangyun, a Song dynasty reworking of the Sui dynasty Qieyun, the character 里 is glossed as "良士切", implying that 里 and 士 have the same vowel. Synchronically, in e.g. Cantonese, it is 资 and 之 /i/ that have vowels closer to cardinal IPA , with 里 (in the meaning of that unit of distance) being /ei/. 

 

With regard to the not-quite-"帀" in Zhuyin, it's because Zhuyin fundamentally sees the final of these seven syllables being a syllabic consonant, and not really a vowel; hence the consonant is enough on its own with the tone mark to specify the pronunciation. This analysis is actually pretty common. More "alternative" perspectives on Mandarin phonology exist (e.g. only two vowels in Mandarin).

[BanZhiYun]

It is exactly a syllabic consonant, 舌尖元音. 反切法 was another type of transcription, before 注音字母 and Pinyin. Then again, Cantonese =/= 普通话, while Pinyin can only transcribe sounds in Mandarin. If we had to be accurate, Cantonese and Mandarin are quite different, so maybe this would go to "comparative" phonetics.

From a historical point of view, it's good to know what is the origin of Mandarin's 书面语 and 口语. The origin of 口语 is 官话, starting from Yuan dynasty. So, saying what the sounds were in Song dynasty (before Yuan) to compare it with nowadays Mandarin is a little bit off. But your post is quite informative, thanks for the info!

[BanZhiYun]

Then again, all of this "comparisons" in previous dynasties are, as I said before, topic of History of Chinese Phonology （音韵学史）, in my opinion. The formal transcriptions made on Mandarin (since it was decided that Mandarin would be the formal 口语, which was during 国语运动）are: 《国语罗马字母》，《注音字母》and now 《汉语拼音方案》. They are all talking about Modern Standard Chinese, 普通话. Pinyin can only describe sounds in Mandarin. Some of  the dialects nowadays pronunciation is more similiar to the pronunciation 文言文 in Ancient times (as I hope you guys know Ancient Chinese and Putonghua had different sound system, hence why reading some of the poems in Putonghua maybe don't rhyme, but they'd rhyme in the past.) 闽方言 and 粤方言 are the two dialects that have the most distinctive difference with Mandarin, in all of the language aspects - 语音，词汇，语法.

[Hofmann]

Seems odd that you're not starting off with more general linguistics courses before getting into the specifics of any particular language (family). I can't imagine how you could talk about 普通話 phonology for a whole semester without getting into historical phonology or anything that would require a more solid foundation on general linguistics. Around here, you'd see maybe a dozen languages in an introductory linguistics course.

[Demonic_Duck]

I think the i in 机 and the i in 资 should not be there

 

The pinyin "i" in those syllables is a completely different sound in each. In 机 it's a standard /i/ sound that's found in lots of languages. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to represent that as "i", even in a perfectly phonetic romanization system.

 

Besides, Pinyin was designed to help Chinese kids learn Mandarin. It was never intended to be perfectly phonetic, nor to approximate English phonology, nor even to help non-native speakers learn (though it undeniably does fulfill that last aim).

[Angelina]

@Demonic

Read the linked articles from post #22

[BanZhiYun]

Seems odd that you're not starting off with more general linguistics courses before getting into the specifics of any particular language (family). I can't imagine how you could talk about 普通話 phonology for a whole semester without getting into historical phonology or anything that would require a more solid foundation on general linguistics. Around here, you'd see maybe a dozen languages in an introductory linguistics course.

 

Yeah, I find it a bit odd as well. They have a 语言学概论 course, which is an introductory course on general linguistics I suppose, but it's not a compulsory course. I am considering picking it as an elective next semester though, it seems it's a basic course that needs to be done when studying linguistics. We're doing Modern Chinese, and the textbook is designed, it first introduces some general topics on each discipline (Introduction, Phonetics, 词汇, Syntax, 修辞，方言)。In each discipline, there is a few introductory chapters before we go into the specific content. For example, the Phonetics chapter was first talking about 语音概说 （声波，发音器官，语音单位，语音符号）, then it goes into 普通话 phonetics (声母，韵母和声调）then 音节的结构 and so on. That's how they have structured the course here. They are not focusing on Historical Phonology, they've made that a completely separate object as I've mentioned before.

[Demonic_Duck]

@Demonic

Read the linked articles from post #22

I did. Which specific point in which of the articles are you referring to, and which of your own points is it providing evidence for?

[Angelina]

Pīnyīn was not designed to help Chinese kids learn Mandarin better, it was designed to replace Chinese characters and it was designed to be phonetic. It is not phonetic enough now, maybe people like BanZhiYun can help improve the glitches.

[BanZhiYun]

@Angelina I haven't read the articles, but if that's what they are saying (I just did an overview on them and they are written by foreigners, lol. Maybe besides the 3rd one? I need to check again). Demonic has a point, though, and I totally agree with him. Pinyin was never meant to replace characters? And it was never meant to be phonetic (compared with IPA, there's no way you can say that Pinyin is phonetic). And yeah, if it was designed to be phonetic back then, how could it not be phonetic enough now? That sort of logic isn't the strongest. (whether that's your own saying or something from the article) It was never meant to be phonetic in the first place.

Besides, Pinyin was designed to help Chinese kids learn Mandarin. It was never intended to be perfectly phonetic, nor to approximate English phonology, nor even to help non-native speakers learn (though it undeniably does fulfill that last aim).

 

Totally agree.