Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

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 »