x and sh in pinyin... bit of an argument (with a native speaker)

[TaxiAsh]

I was watching snooker last night, and a discussion about the pronunciation of Xiao Guodong started. ( 肖国栋) 

The short exchange here was about his family name, but in the show, I noticed they pronounce guo as gu - but that's an aside...

 

A native speaker said I and someone else were wrong with the pronunciation. What's your take on it?

 

 

[suMMit]

I think comparing Chinese and English pronunciations in this way is only useful for explaining to the sound to a "layman" who is not studying Chinese, but wants some simple idea of how a Chinese word is pronounced.

 

I always find it jarring when Western newscasters pronounce Chinese names🤣

[TheBigZaboon]

Arguing with a native speaker (about nearly anything concerning his/her native language) is always a fruitless task... Not only because they always know what they/you are talking about, and thus are always a source of accurate and relevant wisdom (maybe just a tad sarcastic), but...   Well, you know what I mean...

 

But more to the point, we often insist on the absolute accuracy of the paradigms chosen to teach us differences and nuances in someone elses language. But often, those differences and nuances only exist for our benefit, to allow us to make correct choices in their language. Other than that, they may not only not exist, but are only the product of the efforts of some teacher trying to make someone without any other frame of reference understand some strange linguistic phenomenon in the target language.

 

Anybody who has faced down a Korean native speaker over the differences in the pronunciation of any consonant (say "K" versus "G") anywhere in a Korean word or sentence will know what I mean. But the erring learner is absolutely, resolutely confident in the explanation provided in their textbook, and tries to defend the difference to the last breath, ignoring dialect, education levels, male versus female differences, etc., ad infinitum...

 

Be very careful in betting your reputation on whatever you have been taught in a textbook, class, podcast, or the like... Reality is always vastly more complicated...

 

Just sayin'..

 

TBZ 

 

 

 

 

[honglam]

I absolutely agree with @TheBigZaboon's idea.

And more academically speaking, modern linguistics tends to take a descriptive point of view - that is to say, the native speaker is 100% percent right about their mother tongue, and the linguists aim to find the laws behind these language phenomena.

Absolutely, the majority of Chinese you could meet in China have this or that kind of accent. 90%, maybe more native speakers don't speak like news reporters do. But we are still more sensitive to those subtle differences of pronunciation.

And generally, pronouncing the Pinyin "X" as "sh" in English is tolerable, BUT that doesn't means that sounds correct to native speakers. I'd rather say pronouncing "X" as "Shee" or "See" is a typical example of "the accent of foreign speakers". So do the Pinyin "J" and “Q”.

 

[anonymoose]

On 11/17/2024 at 3:04 AM, TaxiAsh said:

What's your take on it?

 

I'm not sure whether you're trying to say x is pronounced the same as s followed by y, are whether you're just saying this is an approximation. To my ears at least, there is still a difference.

[Tomsima]

just hit them with the ɕ next time

[sanchuan]

On 11/17/2024 at 1:12 PM, honglam said:

100% percent right about their mother tongue,

But only in the sense of their production (or 'procedural knowledge'), not their description (or 'declarative knowledge').

[TaxiAsh]

On 11/17/2024 at 4:16 PM, TheBigZaboon said:

Anybody who has faced down a Korean native speaker over the differences in the pronunciation of any consonant (say "K" versus "G") anywhere in a Korean word or sentence will know what I mean

funny you should say that! That's my last 6 months (trying it, not arguing it)