屡见不鲜 －appropriate tone for 鲜

[Wippen (inactive)]

I use this chengyu often，describing how something is (sadly) now common.

屡见不鲜

I believe my choice of tone is the *correct* one with 鲜 being 3rd tone.  The meaning being "rare " rather than "fresh" . However both pronunciations seem to be accepted and widely used.

 

Which version one do you use/have heard being most common?

 

Love this chengyu.

 

[imron]

The Guifan dictionary has this note at the end of the definition:

 

注意：“鲜”这里不读xiǎn，意义跟“少”不同。

 

Where have you seen/heard it as xiǎn?

[Publius]

I've never heard or used the third tone. It's marked first tone in dictionaries published on the mainland and in Taiwan and the meaning is 常常見到，並不新奇, so it appears you're wrong.

[somethingfunny]

Yes, it appears to be first tone, but I can understand the OP's confusion.  鲜见 is third tone and means 少见.

 

I think 鲜 actually is being used to mean "fresh".  Giving something like "Frequently seen, not new", rather than "Frequently seen, not rare".  The latter of which would be a bit of a tautology I guess - not that that would necessarily be a problem in Chinese!

[Wippen (inactive)]

I read this could be both. I think there are several discussions online on this. I will let you know next time I hear it on the news. That word is often heard there. I am worried now my listening skills have let me down, but I am fairly certain they read it as third. Also logical from the two meanings of that character..

[imron]

13 minutes ago, Tøsen said:

Also logical from the two meanings of that character..

I don't think it's logical.  It doesn't really make sense but you can sort of work backwards to make it kind of make sense maybe.

 

鲜 as third tone means 少 so by substitution we have 屡见不少 which is awkward in meaning and logic, 鲜 as xiān makes more sense.

 

15 minutes ago, somethingfunny said:

but I can understand the OP's confusion.  鲜见 is third tone and means 少见.

But in the phrase in question, the characters are in a different order and the 见 goes with 屡, not 鲜.

[somethingfunny]

I said I understand the confusion, not that it is justified.  I know that 鲜见 means 少见.  I don't know the chengyu 屡见不鲜, but it has two of the characters from 鲜见.  So it's an easy mistake to make. 

 

I wouldn't say that 屡见不少 is illogical, just that it doesn't carry the full meaning of "nothing new", or "commonplace through repetition".

[Wippen (inactive)]

I think the jury may still be out on this one. Just browsed baidu and there appear to be similar discussions among natives  might not be clear cut.

[陳德聰]

I don’t think the jury is out at all. There is a “correct” and institutionally backed way to pronounce it, which is first tone. This is a case of a vernacular or folk reading of a word that is acceptable but may mark you as less well-read, in that it simply doesn’t make sense unless you have misunderstood the meaning of the word itself.

 

屢見不鮮 xiān would mean that one sees it multiple times and does not find it new

屢見不鮮 xiǎn would necessarily need to be broken into a pair of 2-character descriptions of the thing as “being seen many times” as well as “not few in number” to make even a slight bit of sense. But 屢見 is not a descriptor, it is an adverb-verb pair, so it doesn’t work anyway.

 

But people are human, and they will say things like “irregardless” and “I could care less,” and we all know exactly what is meant.

 

Edit:

However, my partner claims he learned it as 屢見不鮮(xiǎn) in school, and says that he feels like “經常看到的就不稀少了” is an appropriate understanding of the term. This still seems silly and like a poor logical leap, but if even 1% of people say it this way then that’s still 13 million people (did I do the math right?) so my feelings remain unchanged.

 

Perhaps this is one of those “both pronunciations date back far enough that it simply doesn’t matter” scenarios. I will still say xiān.

[somethingfunny]

I asked this to a room full of Chinese people last night and the consensus pretty quickly became that it was first tone.  There was one person who initially pronounced it with a third tone, but then changed their minds very quickly.  Ironically, that person was a Chinese language teacher.

 

Also, interestingly, nobody seemed very familiar with the term 鲜见 at all.

 

A little off-topic:

 

11 hours ago, 陳德聰 said:

but if even 1% of people say it this way then that’s still 13 million people

 

This is something that's really important for people to bear in mind.  The other day my landlord was asking me why there were so many overseas Chinese students in the UK given how expensive tuition fees are.  I ended up putting it like this: The richest 10% of people in China is more than twice the entire population of the UK.

[Wippen (inactive)]

3 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

I asked this to a room full of Chinese people last night and the consensus pretty quickly became that it was first tone

Really pleased you were able to ask this question. They were probably surprised weren't they? Chinese people I find like such questions. I haven't been able to ask anyone as I am currently not in China.

[Wippen (inactive)]

14 hours ago, 陳德聰 said:

I don’t think the jury is out at all. There is a “correct” and institutionally backed way to pronounce it, which is first tone. This is a case of a vernacular or folk reading of a word that is acceptable but may mark you as less well-read, in that it simply doesn’t make sense unless you have misunderstood the meaning of the word itself.

This dictionary has both tones  listed in its entry. That suggests to me the Jury is still out. However what we need are audio examples from the wild. When I come across them I will post a link on this thread (whichever way the tone is pronounced).

 

https://cn.bing.com/dict/search?q=屡见不鲜&qs=n&form=Z9LH5&sp=-1&pq=屡见不鲜&sc=1-4&sk=&cvid=C1E5147B6DC3413F97CFCA0F07C463E7

 

The bing chinese dictionary incidentally is really good for its wide range of different sentences. But this is a comment apart from the topic in question.

[FrankSe]

Should be 1st tone, however both tones are widely used.

 

“屡见不鲜” originally means "someone has seen(见) something so many times(屡) that he doesn't(不) think it's odd(鲜)". Here ”鲜“ means new/odd, equaling ”新鲜“ actually. But u can see how close ”new/odd" is to "rare" -- I mean if someone rarely sees something he will naturally think it's new/odd, and this misleads lots of people to read it as "xiǎn" which means “少”. For school teaching and exams it's necessary to know the correct pronunciation, but in everyday life it can be totally another thing. Even Chinese students can be confused about tones of some easily-mixed Chinese words.

 

Hope this helps.

[Wippen (inactive)]

5 hours ago, FrankSe said:

屡见不鲜” originally means "someone has seen(见) something so many times(屡) that he doesn't(不) think it's odd(鲜)". Here ”鲜“ means new/odd, equaling ”新鲜“ actually. But u can see how close ”new/odd" is to "rare" -- I mean if someone rarely sees something he will naturally think it's new/odd, and this misleads lots of people to read it as "xiǎn" which means “少”. For school teaching and exams it's necessary to know the correct pronunciation, but in everyday life it can be totally another thing. Even Chinese students can be confused about tones of some easily-mixed Chinese words.

You explained that really well. The "tone" of the post  was also very constructive . It is interesting to have Chinese people commenting.