Zrrr, Zrrr! What does your police car say?
April 20th, 2008
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:
zrrr, zrrr, zrrrMe: 这是什么意思？
zhè shì shénme yìsi?
What does this mean?7-yr-old Beijinger: 因为警车跑得声儿
yīnwèi jǐngchē pǎode shēngr
It’s the sound because the police car is going fast
As far as I understand it from further conversation, the best parallel is something like “whoosh”. Zrrr means “fast”, approximately. You might want to say it’s like “zoom” but it’s unable to function as anything besides an interjection. It couldn’t play the role of verb in a sentence as “zoom” could. Here’s another example:
chē zír jiù dào le fēijīchǎng
车zír 就到了飞机场
The car –whoosh! — arrived at the airport.
In the squishy taxonomy of sounds that Mark Liberman came up with in this Language Log post, zrrr might fall into category 5 (below) — a conventionalized interjection. Or maybe a 6? I don’t think it could qualify as a 7 because it doesn’t seem to quite fit into a sentence as anything but an interjection. In my extremely limited and skeptical understanding of ideophones, this would disqualify it. See Mark Dingemanse’s ideophone blog if you want more on that subject.
1. Sounds not made by humans at all (like things falling, machines working, punches landing)
2. Biologically constrained human sounds (like sneezes, cries of pain, laughter, breathing)
3. Filled pauses and other hesitation sounds (like English uh, um, er)
4. Non-lexical vocal gestures (like clucking the tongue or English “sh+” or “aw+”
5. The wider class of conventionalized interjections (like English whoa or d’oh)
6. Non-phonological onomatopoeic sounds, whether imitations of natural sounds or non-representative evocative noises
7. Ideophonic words and systems of ideophonic vocabulary, fully embedded in a language’s phonological system
In any case, it IS a sound that has clear meaning recognizable by some Beijingers. So here are the questions & thoughts I’m left with.
Writing
None of my Beijingers knew a character for zír. One told me that the word cīr also has exactly the same meaning and use but also knew of no characters for it. Anyone else know of this? I’d be curious how/whether it shows up in comics, which are usually on the bleeding edge of writing conventions.
Prevalence
Is this just a Beijing thing? If not, I’m wondering if other regions érhuà [儿化 = add the R sound] the heck out of it like they do in Beijing.
A New Dictionary
With proper inspiration, you could put together a whole gaggle of words (utterances?) like these. It’d be a fun online dictionary if it had sounds and examples. Send in suggestions and keep the recorders rolling and we’ll see if Beijing Sounds can come up with a critical mass. [Maybe we could then donate the whole thing to the new school of Beijing Dialect.]
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See also:
- Instant Zhonglish improvement — guaranteed (November 1st, 2008)
- A Pirate’s Deal (September 18th, 2008)
- The Beijing-R exposed! (yet still sublime) (August 17th, 2008)
- Read & write Mandarin: no characters required? (June 1st, 2008)
- A Hútòngr Story (March 21st, 2008)
April 21st, 2008 at 2:22 am
I would put this “zir” into category 6: onomatopoeias. One already going dictionary of such things can be found at Sinosplice here: http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/vocab/onomatopeia/
By the way, does your informant say “jichangr” for airport?
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:22 am
Hi Albert, thanks for the great Sinosplice resource. From the ones I know on that list, 咣 guāng is probably my personal favorite all-purpose noise that seems onomatopoeically closest to the actual sound.
The reason I don’t think zír is an onomatopoeia is that it has meaning beyond sound. Maybe the “whoosh” analogy was a bad one for that reason, because zír is supposed to mean very quickly (in a short amount of time) as much as just representing a sound. Another parallel I was thinking of was “snip snap” in the way someone might say, “Then while we were chatting, snip snap, the train arrived at the station.”
Glad you caught the “fēijīchǎngr” pronunciation. I laughed and thought about noting it in the post, but I figured all six of my readers are probably sick and tired of comments about erhuayin. The other thing I start to worry about when using my daughter (that’s her) as an informant is that she’s prone to wordplay. For example she does a mock “southerner” accent that substitutes s- for sh- and c- for ch-, e.g. “si bu si” = “shi bu shi” or “ci fan” for “chi fan”. Another one she does is to erhuayin EVERYthing, just for effect. Sometimes, like this time, I don’t know whether to take her seriously.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Substituting s for sh and c for ch, etc. seems to be a personal problem that is not confined to one region. It is very common here in the northeast as well, but is not a feature of dong1bei3hua4. I have seen many situations as well where a parent has that problem but their son or daughter doesn’t, and sometimes the other way around.
In modern Chinese there is no character zi2 with any meaning at all, let alone an onomatopoeic one.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Good point, Randy. Where were you looking? I couldn’t find one in the ABC dict. Also looked at ze2: there are lots of characters, of course, but none that seem like they could be zer2-ish [I'm not even sure that works as an er-ization]. This would all seem to indicate that zir2 is indeed a “word” of sorts, that has a reasonably distinct meaning but no way of being written using hànzì.
That cracks me up. I’d never heard of the individual, intra-family variation you’re talking about. That may genuinely be some sort of speech impediment if it’s a one-off. But if it’s a problem that parents have and kids don’t, it’s more likely the kids are just learning (thru the educational system) a distinction the older generation was unable to make.
Beyond the northeast, I’ll assume you’re joking (?) — the substitution is pretty widespread in certain regions. Shanghai speakers are the ones who come to mind, but I have no expertise on this. Maybe even (some) Taiwanese speakers? They just don’t differentiate the sounds. The rumor is that this accent is even considered prestigious in some circles.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:28 am
I checked in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典), and also Xiaoma Cidian (http://hmarty.free.fr/hanzi/), which is my favorite online Chinese dictionary because of its interface.
Someday I want to buy a more comprehensive dictionary, but they’re not so cheap.
I hadn’t thought about ze2, but looking that up I found a few interesting (though unhelpful) things. 则 can mean “imitate”, 则声 means “make a sound” (i.e. say something), 责骂 means “scold”, 啧啧 means “clicking the tongue” in a complaining way, but can also mean birds “chirping”. Police cars don’t usually chirp, especially their sirens, but I guess 啧 might be the best candidate for a character for this sound, given that it’s already onomatopoeic, and that many onomatopoeic sounds have multiple uses and even readings.
Any normal syllable in Putonghua can have erhua theoretically.
I don’t remember seeing anything like that sound in the comic books that I’ve seen, but it’s been a little while since I’ve read one. I’ll have to dig some out and refresh my memory as to what sirens say in comics.
My wife’s relatives are all over the map with the s/sh c/ch z/zh thing. And it’s not so simple that one person will always say s/c/z and others will say sh/ch/zh; it’s more that one person will randomly switch between the two sets, even in one sentence.
The problem seems to be that they’re not really sure when the tongue should be flat and when it should be curled. It used to drive me crazy when I first came here and would ask people “how do you say this character?” and they would tell me, and I would memorize it and use it all the time only to find out months later through coming across the character in a dictionary and finding that I learned it wrong. Now I never trust anyone with those 平舌/翘舌 (ping2she2/qiao4she2, flat tongue / curled tongue) characters.
Sometimes I’m at a loss at how people understand each other in China.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Somewhat unrelated, but as for Beijing words without the equivalent in characters, I never did find out how to write “malir de!” that 有快的意思.
All the taxidrivers i talked with, most just said malir was something one said and could not be captured by the written language. One said ma was probably 马上的马, anyone know this?
April 27th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
laowhy,
I think I’ve found something that may help. Baidu’s encyclopedia-type thing has a page on Beijing dialect:
http://baike.baidu.com/view/19066.html?wtp=tt
From that page:
麻利儿—-北京土话，赶快，快点的意思。此语必须加儿化韵，“利儿”读轻声。
málir - Beijing slang. Quickly, quicker. The ‘r’ must be added and ‘lir’ is toneless.
Interestingly, the ABC dictionary offers:
麻利（/俐/力） (máli) S.V. swift, quick, agile, dexterous, quick-witted.
麻利儿地 (málìr de) ADV. quickly, promtly, at once, immediately.
麻溜地 (máliu de) according to Baidu, is Northeast dialect.
The ABC just offers: 麻溜儿 (máliur) S.V. swift, quick, rapid.
syz, hope my excessive use of the ABC dictionary doesn’t bring complaints from from the publishers or, indeed, your other sponsors.
April 28th, 2008 at 4:54 am
@Randy:
Interesting but doesn’t that just imply that the pairs of sounds aren’t phonemic, in their dialect? Even if they tell you they’re phonemic I wouldn’t trust it, because of course that’s what they’ve been taught in pǔtōnghuà. Come to think of it: it’d be a tricky thing to prove one way or the other.
The Xiaoma dictionary looks interesting. I’ll check it out. I’ve always been partial to MDBG (xuezhongwen.net) because it offers a browser toolbar for lookup. But I haven’t used it much since I got my Pleco software with the ABC dictionary. I will sing its praises another time.
@ Laowhy:
Looks like Sima mighta tracked down málir but I like the idea: I’m always on the lookout for “unwritable” (in hànzì) words
@Sima:
With the massive traffic and huge revenues I push back to my sponsors, they are only too happy to be referenced on Beijing Sounds. I’m expecting a sycophantic email in the morning, thanking me for the mention. What do I know: they’re probably paying you off behind the scenes to plant it here.
April 28th, 2008 at 6:07 am
Bugger. I’m that transparent, huh?
btw, I’d like to know the origins of málir, and whether it’s only used in Beijing/Dongbei. One dictionary says that only the adverbial use is dialect.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:29 am
@Sima: Thanks! I’ve always wondered about that. Doesn’t seem like any of the beijingers I talked to ever read that dictionary, perhaps I should sugggest it to them:P
@Syz: Yeah, it’s an interesting concept, only problem being that if anyone feels like writing something they don’t have a character for they’ll use a substitute character and through convention a word will be born. I have however come across some taiwan words that in television series are only subtitled with bopomofo zhuyin though.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:45 am
According to the 东北方言词典 ( dōngběifāngyáncídiǎn , Northeast Dialect Dictionary):
麻利: ma2li, fast
麻溜: ma2liu1, immediately
麻溜: ma2liu, nimble and quick
There is no 儿化 given, and this dictionary usually marks it explicitly. My wife (educated Dongbeiren) says both with no 儿化, and my babysitter (who can only speak very thick Dongbeihua) doesn’t use 麻利 at all, and doesn’t put 儿化 on 麻溜.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I can see a lot has happened since I was here last. I’d just like to say I thought it was hilarious that you can’t take your daughter seriously because she does all this “guyi de” playing with the language. She may have a future in performance. We’ll see.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
[...] Zrrr, Zrrr! What does your police car say? (12) [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 7:07 am
Great stuff! I’m also fascinated by onomatapoeia and obscure characters. As for how to write zír, I’d be very surprised if there’s a standard way. I’ve often been accused of being too obsessed with learning how to write various Chinese snorts, grunts, and harrumphs. Often, if there is a way to write something, there’s also more than one, and no one knows (or cares) what the “standard” is. In these cases, just pick a character that has 口字旁 and go with it. I’d suggest 吇儿.
Other dialects have this problem (no standard way of writing the 土话) in spades. Last semester I took a class in Minnan, and the textbook was very interesting. It had a very unique romanization, and it also had the text written in characters. But, on each page there were at least ten or twelve characters not found in Mandarin, or, in fact, in Unicode. For most of them, the author just made them up.
Somewhat related to this: it’s interesting that all of these kinds of vocalizations are legal Mandarin syllables. You never hear a child or anyone else say an exclamation like, for example, “chíng”, even though the initial “ch” and the final “íng” are both found in Mandarin. This paper has more about that. Talking about “scat singing”: “… what the Chinese performers seem to be doing is juxtaposing entire syllables of the language, choosing from the 1280 or so set of distinct syllables in Mandarin.”
May 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Chris,
Thanks for David Moser’s paper. I want to know more about the process for transliterating foreign words into hanzi. Maybe I’ll try to find him and ask him.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Albert —
As for transliterating foreign words into hanzi, there is definitely a process. I’m working on an article about that now. I’m not sure where it will end up, but stay tuned.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Randy,
Oh good! Please let me/us know when it’s done and where to find it.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:08 am
For those who would prefer to read Moser’s paper in HTML instead of in Word, I have it on my site: Some Things Chinese Characters Can’t Do-Be-Do-Be-Do.