A linguistic hybrid: naming Roman letters in Chinese

[carlo]

Ten minutes ago I was talking to a stranger on the phone in Chinese when I suddenly realized that while many people don't immediately notice my foreign accent, nobody understands me when I spell English words... unless they know English! It's quite funny, it seems I can communicate in either English or Chinese, but for the life of me cannot say an English word with a Chinese accent.

Try spelling C-A-R-L-O for example. Chinese speakers' L sounds neither like English L (/el/) or the Chinese lateral /l/ (as in 路), in fact it sounds like nothing else I've ever heard (a fricative lateral??). R is easier, though RP-like non-rhotic R /A/ will draw a blank. People tend to add some kind of extra vowel (schwa?) after the consonant sound, so that S /es/ becomes /es@/, or a bit like Japanese -esu in desu.

You can ask a Mandarin speaker who doesn't know English to name the letters of the English alphabet (or pinyin) and hear for yourself. It would be an interesting exercise to try to describe what's happening phonetically.

[skylee]

but for the life of me cannot say an English word with a Chinese accent.

I can !!! (or at least with a Cantonese accent)

[HashiriKata]

but for the life of me cannot say an English word with a Chinese accent.

But have you ever learned to do it? I guess that if you give it a fraction of the time you've spent learning Chinese, I think you can.

[carlo]

Great skylee, so you can teach us! What's happening to that L?

HK, actually it's the combination that never occurred to me before, I've done plenty of Italian-accented English and English-accented Chinese (picking it up from fellow learners), but this is really a new research direction.

[fenlan]

Carlo, it would be great to be Italian. When Chinese people go on about Classical Chinese, you can just start talking about the glories of Latin...

[pfff]

perhaps 'L' in pinyin would be 'ei o'

How do you say 'W' though?

[in_lab]

In Taiwan, the common pronunciation of L is el-uo. G is pronounced as a pinyin ju, n is pronounced as a pinyin en, etc. It would be interesting to compare English accents from different regions of China.

[HashiriKata]

Try spelling C-A-R-L-O for example. Chinese speakers' L sounds neither like English L (/el/) or the Chinese lateral /l/ (as in 路)

I think I understand the problem now (I hope anyway).

When Chinese people speak with you in CHINESE and try to spell some word (your name, for example), they are not spelling "English with a Chinese accent", but they are actually citing the letters as standardised in Chinese (which is now a part of Chinese, and no longer English or whatever it's originally come from.) To give a similar example, when a Chinese speaker says "Sugelan" (苏格兰）, he's not saying the English word "Scotland" with a Chinese accent, but he's saying a Chinese word for "Scotland".

If what I said above is correct, I believe there must be in China a standard Chinese way of teaching children the names / sounds of the letters of the alphabet for use in Pinyin; and Chinese speakers also use these names /sounds when spell a foreign word, such as C-A-R-L-O.

So, I think in order to become a very good speaker of Chinese, we should also learn to cite the letters of the alphabet in Chinese way when speaking Chinese, don't you think?

[Quest]

If what I said above is correct, I believe there must be in China a standard Chinese way of teaching children the names / sounds of the letters of the alphabet for use in Pinyin; and Chinese speakers also use these names /sounds when spell a foreign word, such as C-A-R-L-O.

I don't think there's a standard, the standard is English, but people pick up different accents from their English teachers, who are often local Chinese people.

[carlo]

There might well be an official pronounciation of the pinyin 'alphabet', but I don't think I've ever seen it (and I have several shelves of Chinese 工具书). I'm conducting an informal survey this weekend, asking people why they spell Roman letters the way they do. The answer I'm typically getting is, why do you ask, this is *English*.

El-uo, now I have heard this before. Maybe there is a standard after all -- or maybe there are many variants that coexist side by side, regional variations etc.

HK, you understand my question perfectly. I'm trying to understand the way Chinese speaker use English (or Italian: 比萨饼) while speaking Chinese, much like a French learner of English struggles to understand the English pronunciation of 'omelette'. My intention is to learn to name Roman letters in a Chinese way when speaking Chinese, that's in fact the point of my post. Roman letters these days are colloquially referred to in Chinese as 英文字母, even though they are a part of modern Chinese (eg 卡拉ok). Is the pronunciation standardised? Show me the standard, and you've answered my question.

Fenlan, I think being Iraqi or Egyptian would be even more fun, 5000 years civilisation? Oldest writing system?

[super_zebra]

I find that whenever I spell out the letters in an English word while speaking in Chinese, I use the first tone in Chiense to pronounce all the letters... instead of just saying the letters normally like I would in English.

I'm an American raised Taiwanese kid, so while I'm a native speaker in English my mom often has me spell out words for her in English she doesn't know.... and I just noticed recently that I do that, and that when she tries to spell out words in English she uses chinese 1st tone too.

I'm not exactly sure when you say that you want to say English with a Chinese accent. Doesn't that totally defeat the whole purpose of trying to get good at a language?

[Lu]

As far as I heard, in Taiwan all Latin letters are pronounced in the first tone (including the B, which is NEVER first tone on the mainland). So it's not so strange that you and your mother pronounce it that way.

[carlo]

Sorry for the confusion. Obviously my goal is not to learn to speak bad English or Chinese on purpose, that would be rather pointless (not to mention unnecessary - I can do this already ;).

Loanwords in any language behave differently according to the extent and way in which they are assimilated into the target language. Sometimes, a 'foreign' target pronunciation (or approximation thereof) is retained in the target language. There are many loanwords in English, like 'entrepreneur' or 'chef d'ouvre', which are undergoing a transition between the original target pronunciation to full assimilation into the sound system of English, so that a compromise is eventually reached, loosely speaking, between accurate reproduction of the original sound (the speaker wants to show that he knows where the word comes from) and the phonemic constraints of English (the speaker doesn't want to sound affected etc).

My impression is that something similar is happening to Roman letters in Chinese. From a linguistic point of view, I find it intriguing.

[in_lab]

But with the alphabet, most people are not aware that their pronunciation is not the same as that used by English-speakers.

[shibo77]

Lettres/Chinese accented English lettres/Pronunciation of Hanyu Pinyin lettres in Hanyu Pinyin

A ay ā

B 壁 bē

C 希 cē

D 帝 dē

E 亿 ē

F eh fuh éf

G zhee gē

H ay-ch(eh-ch) hā

I 爱 yī

J 这(zhèi) jiē

K kay kē

L ehl-luh(ehl-lwo) él

M eh-muh ém

N 恩 nē

O 欧 ō

P 屁 pē

Q kiur qiū

R 儿 ár

S eh-seh és

T 剃 tē

U 哟 wū

Ü ~ yū

V 威 vē

W 答不六 wā

X 爱克斯 xī

Y 外 yā

Z zay zē

Most of the pronunciation for the Mandarin Chinese-accented English lettres are expressable as a sound found in Mandarin Chinese. Most of them are pronounced with a fourth tone, in my experience at least.

-Shìbó

[carlo]

Thanks shibo77, good transcriptions. So there is an official way for naming pinyin letters after all. I don't think I've ever heard it being used though, does anybody actually use it (apart possibly for schoolteachers)?

I finally found something in an article by 周一民 called 《VCD该怎么读 -- 谈谈英语字母的普通话读音》(in 现代北京话研究）. It may be worth quoting from it directly. 「英语字母已经大量进入了汉语，成为现代汉语交际中不可缺少的词汇成分。字母和字母缩写词可以借进来， 英语发音却很难同汉语语音系统相容。拿VCD举例， 一个人即便懂英语, 去商店买VCD也不会把它叫成 /vi: si: di:/, 如果真这样说，别人会感觉他的发音有些怪异，故意拿洋腔。」Roman letters have already become part of the vocabulary of Chinese, but their pronunciation is heavily influenced by the phonemic constraints of Chinese (putonghua). If someone went to buy VCDs and used the standard English reading /vi: si: di:/, it would sound unnatural and affected. (The actual prnunciation is closer to wei1sei1di4).

「根据北京语音改造的英语字母发音与英语相似而不相同， 其中所用的音素都是在北京音系的范围之内的，例如浊辅音全部变成了清辅音。音节则有小部分变化， 例如K、Q的发音kei4、kiu4便是北京音系中没有的.... 每个字母都有固定声调， 一般不能随意读成其他调.... 应该承认这套发音是人民群众在长期语言实践中创造出来而且是约定俗成的。」

This is the transcription I found, in some kind of 'modified pinyin':

A ei1

B bi4

C sei1

D di4

E yi4

F aif2

G ji4

H aich2

I ai4

J zhei4

K kei4

L ai2lou

M aim2

N en1

O ou1

P pi4

Q kiu4

R aer4

S ais2

T ti4

U you1

V wei1

W da2bliu

X aiks2

Y wai4

Z zei4

[in_lab]

I don't think the pronunciation is as standardized as it seems by looking at a list like that. I think the pronounciation of C in VCD is definitely 西, not sei, but the v ranges from wi to vi to vwi, and not wei as the article mentions. It must vary regionally and by person, so I don't think there can be any authoritative conclusions.

[HashiriKata]

Just as I predicted at the beginning of the thread, I still believe there is a standard (but whether the standard is adhered to is another question). Otherwise, it'd be imposible for school teachers and pupils to refer to any of the letters in a relatively uniformed, mutually intelligible way.

[carlo]

in_lab: it's likely there are major regional variations, after all the phonetic systems of different Chinese languages/dialects are not the same, and as there is no 'standard' in the sense of a single pronunciation enforced and taught in schools, the existence of such differences is not surprising.

I think the article I quoted also mention that the pronunciation [xi] is more common in the South. I don't really know what the situation is like in Taiwan. Beijing pronunciation is often perceived as 'standard' by putonghua speakers (even when it deviates from the official standards), so it seems like a good starting point. I hear people peddling 'VCD's almost daily, and I think many of the locals say [sei], while the lady from Anhui I usually buy from says [xi]. But I'm really curious to hear what others think.

[atitarev]

It looks there is no standard way of transcribing Latin letters in Chinese, e.g. I saw another chart where W is called [WA]. It all depends on the speaker's knowledge.