当 - equivalent to 'when...' in English?

[LinZhenPu]

I think we need to entice a bona fide Chinese language linguist to sign up to these forums and offer some advice...

[陳德聰]

I'm already surveying people in my life lol. Immediate family so far have 0/2 who have ever heard of "dàng"天／月／年／地.

[LinZhenPu]

I'm already surveying people in my life lol. Immediate family so far have 0/2 who have ever heard of "dàng"天／月／年／地. 

What about 当(dàng)时?

[陳德聰]

Now 0/5 to include my partner's employees... Yes 当(dàng)时 was also queried for the last three folks. I mean 5 is not a large enough sample size, but it is enough to have me wondering who it is that actually does say that? Am I crazy here? The internet seems to have lots of people answering this question on Baidu with "well the standard is this but everybody just uses first tone"-type answers, which is not very satisfying.

[roddy]

Oh, you were looking for satisfaction, Mr 陳? May I suggest Esperanto, third floor.

 

This is quite possibly something that exists in the Putonghua Ceshi and CCTV job interviews only. But I'd like to see your questionnaire so we can check it for robust scientific method ;-)

[stapler]

So basically it can be lumped together with 主意 as another word that no one says as per the dictionary.

[Guest realmayo]

I just dipped into my 锵锵三人行 archive and the first 当时 I came up with was from 2016/08/17:

 

... 就是说我们几个朋友吃饭，当时我身边也有个女同事就好像幼婷这样吧，对吧，我们当然没有什么关 系，...

 

mp3 snippet attached

 

 

praat tonal analysis (highlighted in red is the 当时) attached

 

 

 

danshi1.mp3

[陳德聰]

And the 飯?

[Guest realmayo]

what do you mean?

[陳德聰]

I thought you were offering that as an example of fourth tone, so I wondered about how you explain the shape of the "吃飯" tones if you would take the highlighted portion to be a fourth tone...

[Angelina]

plus, you know, tone sandhi, it's not like you can isolate the pronunciation of any random 当...  

[Guest realmayo]

陳德聰 if you listen to the mp3 you will hear that there is a gap between the male speaker saying 饭 and the male speaker saying 当 and in that gap we hear the female speaker saying ah-ha and the male speaker saying er and not only do we hear those sounds, praat hears them too and represents them on that screenshot I posted. The (early) 饭 is represented with a short sharp downward blue line.

[Guest realmayo]

Here's the host's 当地： clearly first tone 当, I would say:

然后当地的...

 

 

dd1.mp3

 

(I know it looks like a rising-then-falling tone but (a) I believe the (slow-) rising part is pretty common to how first tones are actually spoken and (b) the falling part is, if you look at the top half of the graphic, basically inaudible, it's the 'g' of the 'ng' part of 'dang'!)

[Guest realmayo]

And the same guy saying 当时 soon afterwards has the same rising-falling (although my guess is that the falling-part is stronger here simply because he has to get down low enough to start the 时 from an appropriate position.

 

(当时 highlighted)

 

 

 

ds4.mp3