Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Zhōu Yǒuguāng on a Beijing talk show; 4=2 in Beijing; Pinyin and topolects; schadenfreude

Everyone knows that literacy in Mandarin means hour after brutal hour of memorizing and practicing a script whose design clearly shows the influence of sadistic genius. Here are a couple of favorites from the torture rack: two pairs of characters that have absolutely no connection except that they just might possibly, to the benighted, appear to be vaguely similar in form to one another.

衣农， 日曰

Well, at least we think we know what Mandarin literacy means. But do we really? Could you possibly get away with achieving literacy through something less than masochism? A couple of prominent writers have recently hinted that perhaps it does not have to be as bad as all that (for the foreign learner, we’re talking about right now).

On pinyin.info Mark Swofford, who has been known to use the M-word (masochism) in relation to character-learning, has compiled a list of readings in Pinyin. If you couple those with a pinyin-based dictionary like the ABC (which is contained in the Pleco dictionary by the way, one of my favorite Mandarin tools — I keep meaning to rave about it at length), you could find yourself reading real Mandarin, including literary works, in blissful ignorance of Chinese characters! By the way, the post also references a good book on pinyin orthographic conventions along with a sample chapter! This is so good that I should devote more space to it in another post.

On Language Log, Victor Mair also invokes the M-word in connection with characters, but continues on an optimistic note with the news that a just-launched newspaper has characters paired with pinyin for pronunciation. For Mandarin teachers he hopes this could be a step in the right direction, away from “brute force” early-stage memorization of characters and towards something more like “benign pedagogical methods” that emphasize acquisition of the language up front and only later introduce the script.

So there’s the gist of it: you can now, in some enlightened places, study Mandarin as a foreigner without immediately being crushed under the weight of a script that has gone thousands of years without linguistically significant reform. Even better, you can access resources that allow you to read Mandarin, picking up pronunciation and vocabulary, without the added burden of memorizing a few thousand characters. But can you really get away with ignoring the ubiquitous hànzì? Probably not. Hence more time spent some days with the Pleco dictionary than with the spousal unit. And I’d have to agree with John at Sinosplice that Mair’s article seems to exaggerate the joys of using pinyin to learn characters. It’s still damn hard.

Thanks, Mr. Zhou

Even though you can’t avoid the pain, you should still be grateful to this Shànghǎirén (上海人, person from Shanghai) who has adopted Beijing as his home and is well known as one of the key players in the creation of Pinyin. We’ve seen a bit of Zhōu Yǒuguāng (previous post here and video here), but it would be nice to know a little more about what he’s been thinking. What does he think the point of Pinyin is, anyway? I was pleasantly surprised to turn up, after a bit of browsing, a video that not only is recent, but also offers some interesting history and substantial discussion.

Here’s all 43 minutes, and a link if the embedding doesn’t work:

That’s a lot of video, so just a few observations below: on Hanyu Pinyin as a two syllable term; Pinyin and the topolects; how learning characters could be worse.

1. The two syllables of “Hanyu Pinyin”

Sometimes even when you know exactly what someone’s going to say, it’s hard to understand it. Earlier discussions have covered elliptical Beijing phonetics, where /sh/ or /xi / or /zh/ get dropped from casual speech. The first speaker from the audience has the full range of that — even check out the nearly-dropped /ch/ in fēicháng in the dialog below.

But turning the four syllables of hànyǔ pīnyīn into two is a new one for me. Try this on for size:

Host:
Lánsède zhèige cíbǎnshang guàde shì shénme?
蓝色的这个词板上挂的是什么？

Beijinger:
yīgè, sāngè fēicháng kěpàde zì
一个，三个非常非常可怕的字。

Host:
这是英语吗？

Beijinger:
Zhè yīnggāi shì hànyǔ pīnyīn
这应该是汉语拼音…

Now pinpointing the beginning/end of a syllable is tricky business for anyone (if someone can Praat this, I’d post it in a nanosec), so feel free to argue that it’s still four. But you have to admit that by not closing off the N in either “hanyu” or “pinyin”, as is common among Beijingers at least, he comes pretty close to giving us just a nasalized vowel sound in the first word and an extended /i/ in the second.

As long as we’re taking this side tour away from Pinyin, it’s worth one more quote from our Beijinger and the host to hear a snippet of discussion on housing prices as they relate to salaries. It’s a topic of endless conversation in Beijing. Folks know price-per-square-meter figures the way Americans know gas prices. Since it’s a safe topic among strangers, small talk about housing prices is as pervasive (and mournful in tone) as small talk about the weather in Minnesota.

Host:
Ei wǒ tīngguo yīgè zhuānjiā gēn wǒ shuōguo,
唉我听过一个专家根我说过
Hey, I’ve heard an expert tell me

tā shuō [shuō] zhèige hélǐde fángjià
他说这个合理的房价
he said these housing prices would be rational

shì zhèige chéngshì jūmínde yuèpíngjūn gōngzī
是这个城市居民的月平均工资
if a city resident’s monthly salary

yuèpíngjūn gōngzī néng mǎi yīpíngmǐ
月平均工资能买一平米
monthly salary could buy one square meter

tā rènwéi zhèige fángjià jiùshì [jiùshì] héshì le
他认为这个房价就是合适了
[then] he figures these housing prices are about right.

Beijinger:
Yě chàbuduō
也差不多
Sounds about right.

Host:
Nǐ xiànzài yuè gōngzī yě sānwàn duō ma, chàbuduō?
你现在约工资也三万多吗，差不多？
Your monthly salary is now also about 30k RMB more or less, right? [i.e. about $4000/mo -- outrageously high for an average Chinese]

Beijinger:
Mǒmo yīgè língr chéng ma?
抹抹一个零儿成吗？
Could we wipe out a zero?

Any opinions on the character for the host’s first utterance, “ei”? The ABC dictionary has that character (唉) as “ai” — an interjection.

Without further information, this dialog is pretty strong evidence the host is a Beijinger as well. He’s close to dropping a couple of SHs, e.g. especially in jiùshì (就是). The respondent then does a classic Beijing-R-ification with língr, which connotes, as others have noted about érhuà (儿化) a diminutive aspect.

2. Pinyin might hold hope for the topolects

After the show’s host brings up the subject of Pinyin with Zhou, he asks the audience what it’s good for. The first answer is “foreigners learning Chinese” — fine as far as that goes. I’m certainly a believer. The second is something about pinyin giving Chinese the best of both worlds: an alphabetic system and the “ideographs” (象形 = xiàngxíng). Not sure what to make of that.

But the third audience member brings up the idea that pinyin can be used to write anything, especially the fāngyán (topolects, to use Victor Mair’s word) i.e. the Wu language, Cantonese, etc. Now leaving aside the fact that Pinyin is getting conflated with the more general idea of phoneme-based writing, the assertion is still interesting. It shows that this (presumed) layman is quite aware that the topolects are not generally written using characters, that what gets written is, in fact, just pǔtōnghuà i.e. standard Mandarin. The topolects are, with some limited exceptions, scriptless. This is a shame, as every language deserves a good script.

The suggestion that all the topolects should be romanized has been made in China since at least the 1890s, as discussed in DeFrancis’s superb book, Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Pinyin.info has a sample chapter). From page 242:

Perhaps the central issue [among the first reformers in the 1890s] was just what kind of Chinese speech should be represented by the new alphabets. One group wanted to confine their use to representing Mandarin. Another group argued that literacy even in alphabetic Mandarin was too difficult for some of the illiterate masses and insisted on creating separate phonetic schemes for the various regionalects and relegating use of the Mandarin-based script to situations in which a national orthography was essential.

Clearly the latter has prevailed, to the extent that Pinyin is adopted as a script at all. If I had a vote, I’d put it in with the former group as a way of promoting full literacy.

3. Learning characters could be even worse

And then there is Zhou’s answer. What’s Pinyin good for? He comments on how it allows you to figure out the pronunciation of characters without the benefit of having a teacher around to tell you. Sounds like a duh, but had you ever thought about how bad things could be? Here’s the system he describes

Zhou:
Wǒ xiǎode shíhòu dúshū
我小的时候读书
When I was young and reading books,

yīgè zì bùrènshi jiù yào wèn lǎoshī
一个字不认识就要问老师
if I didn’t recognize a character I had to ask the teacher

chá zìdiǎn bùxíng
查字典不行
It wouldn’t work to look in the dictionary

Host:
shīfu dài túdi
师傅带徒弟
Master leads apprentice

Zhou:
yīnwèi zìdiǎn shàngmian yòng fǎnqiède fāngfǎ lái zhùyīn
因为字典上面用反切的方法来注音
Because the dictionary uses this method of joining two characters to indicate pronunciation

Yào rèn liǎngge zì lái zhù yīgè zì xiǎoháizi bùnéng yòng
要认两个字来注一个字小孩子不能用
If you have to recognize two characters to pronounce one character, children won’t be able to use it

Ouch, no kidding. I knew nothing about fǎnqiède fāngfǎ (反切的方法) before this. A quick Baidu search turns up this explanation (in Mandarin, in characters) which links to the graphic below, which you’ll notice just can’t resist adding in a few Pinyin consonants just to help the explanation. Try that for a while, then thank your lucky stars you’ve got Pinyin.