Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Introducing a new blog on Manchu

For those of us in the “slightly obsessive about Beijing Dialect” category, it’s always a bit of a head-scratcher to think that Mandarin was not the exclusive language of the ruling class here during a good chunk of the last 400 years.

The Manchu, with their mǎnyǔ (满语 = Manchu language) were, of course, the folks that ruled Beijing during the majority of that time up until 1912 or so — the Qing Dynasty. And it is not a language you can really mistake for Běijīnghuà. It’s in the Tungusic family and bears a lot more similarity to agglutinative languages (read: lots of endings pasted onto words) like Korean and Japanese than to Mandarin.

Given the state of mǎnyǔ in Beijing today — virtually nonexistent — it seems reasonable to think its speakers either took a liking to Běijīnghuà or simply migrated back out to the ancestral homelands towards the northeast from which they had come. But is that really the case? And is it really possible, as some popular belief has it, that the Manchu language left virtually no trace of an influence on the local language except for a few borrowed words? Read the rest of this entry »

On learning from elders — the core principles

The currency at Beijing Sounds is recordings of course. Youtube, Youku — they’re equally negotiable (and better than the sad sack USD these days). Or leave the recorder running and get candids on your friends, your relatives, your shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Money!

The truly gold-backed currency, though, is no mere sound file. It’s the special issue, hard-to-find back room recording. What makes the back room recording the gold standard is the observation that what people actually do is different from what they say they do, or what they believe they do, or what somebody remembers that they do, because these “reporting” activities are prone to egregious errors, willful misstatements and utter misapprehensions. So while it might seem easy enough to get a recording of real language, in fact it gets very hard to observe what people actually do in context because the contexts are behind the closed doors of the home, or in meetings at the workplace, or between close friends — places that are hard to get your ears into unless you have an inside track. Read the rest of this entry »

More on the “sounds” front: a Beijing dialect vocalization.

Learning what animals say in languages other than your native one is always jolting. Consider, if you will, the utter silliness of Mandarin-speakers thinking dogs should say “wàng wàng” when everyone knows they say “woof woof”.

After a few illogical discussions of that sort, you eventually acknowledge that animal sounds are just convention and try to shrug off your prejudices. But it’s disconcerting to realize there’s a whole class of sounds that you think of as natural, almost innate, that are actually quite conventionalized and culturally specific.

Here’s one from a category I hadn’t thought of: car movement. In the US, the police car of the average seven-year-old almost certainly says “woooo, wooo” while it goes “zoom zoom” or something of the sort. But check out this Beijing police car, zooming in the vernacular: Read the rest of this entry »

A different way of thinking about how to put tones together

Let’s say you’re living in China’s Minnesota, the frigid dōngběi (东北 = northeast). You’ve come to Beijing for a bit of R&R and have met up with syz and his audio recorder. The idea is to talk linguistics and maybe record a random conversation or two along the way — fodder for the blog.

Suddenly after taxiing around Beijing for a bit, innocently explaining to the sījī (司机 = driver) where you’re from, syz interrupts your Mandarin train of thought with, “Hey, could I use some of this for the next episode of Zhonglish?”

What do you say? Was “Zhonglish” part of the bargain? Do you let the insult slide so as to achieve ever-lasting notoriety on the world’s most widely read (N=8) blog about the minutia of běijīnghuà?

Of course you do! Because syz has the most sympathetic ear you’ll ever find. His own thick tongue and disturbing (to him) inability to memorize hànzì make him eminently sympathetic to the difficulties of Mandarin. Anyway, calling your speech “Zhonglish” is no insult — it says so right here in the definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Special thanks to a reader in the sānlǐtún (三里屯) area for bringing this to my attention and providing the sound clip. You’ll probably recall the local Beijinger uproar last August when it came out that that Legal Mirror was publishing some Shanghai dialect expressions in a grammar book.

Why, they wondered, couldn’t Beijing get equal treatment for its beloved tǔhuà 土话?

(Here’s a link to the Danwei summary of the controversy and some pretty off-the-mark interpretations of local dialect words from the mouths of youngsters.) Read the rest of this entry »

On Mandarin learning challenges, the definition of language, and the best taxi-driver critique of hànzì ever recorded.

You’ll be forgiven if you missed the pins-and-needles press conference of foreign minister (wàijiāobùzhǎng, 外交部长) Yáng Jiéchí 杨洁篪 a couple of weeks ago (hat tip to Joel Martinsen at Danwei). Read the rest of this entry »

Regarding neighborhood enmity, L=N, and other hútòng realities.

Reality is never quite what you think it is, let alone the way you relate it to others. To tell a story you have to simplify, abstract, highlight and gloss over, of course. That’s the nature of storytelling. Trouble is, a lot of times what you end up with is wishful thinking, platitudes & nostalgia — an idealized reality that isn’t real at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Caution: Not a post to be read aloud among small children or grandmothers

Readers & commenters have been more diligent than your haplessly hard-working correspondent recently. There’s some great dialog about how L and N, or P, F & H blend together in different languages. Read the rest of this entry »

Can’t resist the French reference in this NYT opinion piece, Medvedev. Mehd-V(y)EHD-yehf. Whatever, (hat tip to Language Hat) that parallels the Beijing Sounds discussion on English’s Beizzhing. Revealing quote:

One of the ways we compensate for the difficulty of foreign names is by adopting our own way of saying them. I once worked with an editor who spoke pretty good French, but used only the feminine article “la,” never “le.” Why, I finally asked? “Oh, it sounds SO much more French that way,” he drawled.

Vindication for Beizzhing: French is the universal “foreign” accent.

Now I know what you Bay-Jing purists (e.g. Graham, who has a Bay-Jing post at the Linguism blog) are gonna say: “But Bay-Jing is easy for native English speakers! Why can’t we just insist on it?”

That misses the point. Bay-Jing is easy, too easy. Like “la” in French, it just doesn’t sound foreign enough!

A sound you almost certainly will get to hear in Beijing someday, if you’re so fortunate, is the sound of Lǐ Chuányùn 李传韵 fiddling. The Qingdao native is a world phenomenon and the recipient of a loan instrument from the Stradivari society. What you won’t hear from Beijingers, though, is his particular flavor of Mandarin. Read the rest of this entry »