We need to ask ourselves: might they have been invited in?

Fast forward to late October, one week before election time, when the Obama infomercial carried, according to our sources who have provided the recording, a communication from the Manchurian candidate himself to those who are likely his controllers. Before reading on, listen for yourself and see if you can understand the not-so-subtle message:

[See post to listen to audio]

Asked for comment on this shocking statement — a revelation that would have been the ultimate October surprise had the Beijing Sounds production staff not displayed their usual incompetence and misplaced the tape in the cold storage room — Obama’s transition staff made the usual protestations that the president-elect’s statement was “taken out of context.”*

Careful readers of this blog may be clear-thinking enough to offer other explanations. We know that the recorder doesn’t lie. Even the most tone-unconscious and stuttering Zhonglish is a legitimate attempt at communication and I, for one, am horrified at the implications.

———-

[ADVERTISEMENT: don't forget to consider the Zhonglish / Chinglish conference on Nov 17]

———-

*How far out of context? Well, I’d always wanted to see if you could do this kind of thing. It was actually pretty easy, although a little tedious and I can’t see myself doing it again anytime soon.
1. “wǒ” from “Juanita” [Update: forgot to mention -- I did take also slice off the initial /h/ in Obama's /hwanita/ to get this wǒ. Thanks to that /h/ I was able to re-use the word for huān (see #3 below). It's actually getting harder and harder to find /hw/ in American speech, it seems to me, and even when it's there it's not usually as breathy as the Mandarin /hw/.]
2. “xǐ” from “address the economics” by taking the “th” out of “the” — seems to give you something closer to the “x” sound than just a standard English /sh/ or /s/
3. “huān” is also from “Juanita”, the same utterance in fact
4. “Zhōng” is from “jobs that don‘t work” using the /j/ of “jobs” and the “on” of “don’t”
5. “guó” is the most tortuous, coming out of two sentences “…gets as many on the road as possible. And to reduce our dependence on foreign oil…” by snipping out all the stuff in the middle and that final dark /l/ (which was the trickiest part). There must have been a better way.

Voila: wǒ xǐhuān Zhōngguó (我喜欢中国 = I like China) — straight from the candidate’s lips.

If you have responded but not heard back from me, please write again (bjshengr -AT- gmail -DOT- com). If you’re still not getting through, you can always leave a comment. BTW, it’s never too late to respond!

Thanks and look forward to meeting you all

—–

Life is like a karaoke club — you always think you sound a bit better than you really do.

A karaoke club is like life — you can get away with a lot more foolishness than you think.

Extra Beijing Sounds credits — BJS Bucks — to the first reader who identifies a KTV where you and your favorite èrnǎi* (二奶 = mistress) can sing along to Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend. According to Shanghaiist (h/t to Danwei), Lavigne is poised to make a lot more than mere BJS Bucks by localizing her product with some nips and tucks of Zhonglish, “as well as Japanese and five other European languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.”

Well, nothing wrong with serving the needs of the market, says the marketer in syz.

Zhonglish Sampling

But how about that Zhonglish? Unfortunately you can’t hear the youtube version that Shanghaiist posted cuz, well…

Where’s good old-fashioned pirated content when you need it?! (Oh yeah, Baidu, probably.) The Danwei recording is still available, but doesn’t have as much quality Zhonglish, so what options are left but to ACTUALLY PURCHASE THE MUSIC LEGALLY.

Yes, that’s right. The BJS Studios have sent an entire American dollar, which is actually worth something at present, to Steve Jobs in exchange for the honor of being the second iTunes purchaser, behind Avril’s mom, of the Mandarin version of Girlfriend.

Thank the overflowing studio coffers.

Not only that, but in the interest of
a) not being shanghaid by Sony BMG
b) avoiding the “but is it music?” debate

… I’m posting not the entire piece but just a clip of the precious Zhonglish that concerns us here today. Let’s have a listen:

[See post to listen to audio]
Hey hey you you… [ok, I'm skipping the echo girls from now on]

wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou
我不喜欢你女朋友
I don’t like your girlfriend

nǐ xūyào yīge xīnde
你需要一个新的
You need a new one

wǒ zěnme huì shì nǐde nǚpéngyou?
我怎么会是你的女朋友?
How can I be your girlfriend?

riff

wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ
我知道你喜欢我
I know you like me

shì yīge mìmi
是一个秘密
It’s a secret**

wǒ yào dāng nǐde nǚpéngyou
我要当你的女朋友
I want to be your girlfriend

riff

wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou
我不喜欢你女朋友
I don’t like your girlfriend

nǐ xūyào yīge xīnde
你需要一个新的
You need a new one

wǒ zěnme huì shì nǐde nǚpéngyou?
我怎么会是你的女朋友?
How can I be your girlfriend?

riff

wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ
我知道你喜欢我
I know you like me

shì yīge mìmi
是一个秘密
It’s a secret

wǒ yào dāng nǐde nǚpéngyou
我要当你的女朋友
I want to be your girlfriend

feedback

“Mortifying”?

The iTunes reviews follow the predictable anonymous-poster pattern of love/hate, with perhaps an unusually heavy emphasis on the latter. A quick sampling:

“I might buy this version just for laughs”
“umm… wow… that sucked”
“How bad does a song have to be that you need to make 5 different versions in hopes SOMEONE will buy it.”

but then there’s her PR firm (visualize a frantic 38-yr-old marketing manager and her associate: “We’ve gotta do something to fight these negatives — hey! yeah, we can make up positive comments! but — well, it’s gotta sound real. We don’t want to come off like a bunch of stiffs in the industry. What’s that? Yeah, great idea! Kids are always using the abbreviations! OMG! so cool…”) –

“OMG, can’t believe she has a Mandarin version! I can really understand what she’s saying! I think this is really creative…definitely catchy and worth buying. Avril’s talent is amazing!”

BJS takes no editorial position on the quality of the music or the moral value of localization. We do, however, take issue with blanket statements about anyone’s Zhonglish — and there are plenty of those:

“you can’t even understand the words”
“a disgrace of chinese/mandarin speakers”
“a complete insult to the language”

Is it as bad as all that? Could Lavigne’s manager, as quoted from Shanghaiist, be making it all up?

In order to get the intonation and meter just right, she spent hours studying recordings by foreign language singers. Once Lavigne felt comfortable, she headed into the studio with a tutor and spent “a couple of hours nailing it”

The advantage of doing Zhonglish in music, of course, is that you get a freebie: no tone worries. That’s the “instant Zhonglish improvement” guaranteed in the title of this post. You, too, could have some of the Zhonglish privileges afforded to the likes of Avril Lavigne, just by stepping foot into your local KTV.

Now clearly her pronunciation is lacking a Beijing lilt. But why? For analysis, we start once again with Chao’s Grammar of Spoken Chinese (also referenced here, here and here).

Most English-speaking learners of Chinese favor the retroflexes (they usually pronounce them too palatally, anyway, thus making them sound like palatals to start with).

If you’ve heard much Zhonglish, you’re familiar with what he’s saying: the Zhonglish-speaker tends to meld the sh of shì and the x of xī into a single, palatalized, English-imitating sh-sound. So how does Avril do? [first name basis is OK now, right? we're all Zhonglish speakers today] Listen to her first three Xs, repeated for your listening pleasure:

[See post to listen to audio]
wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou, nǐ xūyào yīge xīnde

In this sample, the Zhonglish analysts actually give her a solid B for the discipline not to “favor the retroflexes”. Arguably there’s a bit of tongue movement in that direction, but it’s not, I think, what gives her the distinctive Zhonglish flavor. It’s more her vowels that give her away. For example the “ao” of xūyào uses the American/Canadian diphthong rather than the Mandarin, so [aʊ̯] instead of [ɑʊ̯] if I got the IPA right. It also sounds like there’s a bit of native language influence in the “huan” of “bùxǐhuān”. As we all know, /hw/ seems a bit endangered in English, with lots of people (but not this eastern Washingtonian) thinking that which & witch sound the same. And even holdouts like me generally don’t have a problem with considering the /h/ optional. But it’s not optional in Mandarin, and its omission seems salient in this case.

Overall, if I had to point to one feature that sounds most -glish and least Zhong, it’s the “zhīdao” of “wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ”. Here’s your clip:
[See post to listen to audio]
The “ao” has the same [aʊ̯] problem mentioned above. More importantly, the rhoticization of “zhī” is very much from the rhotic-English tradition; it’s not the Beijing-R. I wish I could describe it in more detailed phonetic terms, but I lack the knowledge. Can anyone do it justice? For the time being, suffice it to say that, as much as there’s similarity between the Beijing and American R, they are definitely not the same and it becomes quite apparent in situations like this.

In fairness to Avril, though, I’m not sure any of this analysis would help someone in her position, who presumably has zero Mandarin background and wants to spend enough time to get it roughly right in a song. Would you tell her to use “no R”? To say something like “Juh - dow”? That might actually come out worse.

One more twist: Out of curiosity, I emailed the sound file above (all Mandarin, no English, no context) to a friend who hails from around Xi’an and who, like me, has no knowledge of pop culture in any form. I asked him what he thought of the accent:

F: standard chinese

Syz: listen again carefully and see if you think it’s possible she’s a foreigner

F: can’t hear an accent

Syz: she actually doesn’t know any mandarin

F: she’s good

Syz: i’m pretty sure i hear an accent. listen to how she says 知道

F: yeah, that i could hear. but it’s a song

Beijing dialect it may not be, but this is a pretty strong refutation of any blustering about how her Mandarin is “incomprehensible.” So as with every Zhonglish analysis, we’ll end with a toast to anyone, including a blatantly self-promoting pop singer, who’s willing to put some Zhonglish on the line for public analysis.

————–
*Why with the èrnǎi? It just feels more appropriate. Maybe something to do with the lyrics? To pare it down: “I don’t like your girlfriend! I think you need a new one. I could be your girlfriend. I know that you like me. Don’t you know what I could do to make you feel alright? Don’t pretend — I think you know I’m damn precious. And hell yeah, I’m the mother fuckin’ princess. I can tell you like me too and you know I’m right. She’s like, so, whatever. You could do so much better. I think we should get together now.”

**I’m guessing this should have been “bùshì yīge mìmi” [it's NOT a secret] to be consistent with the English, but I can’t hear any “bu” there at all.

You probably remember hearing Jimi Hendrix for the first time when he sang, “Scuze me, while I kiss this guy.”

“Hey,” you thought, “kinda makes sense. After all, it was the 60s, experimentation was all the rage, purple haze was floating around…”

Until you were talking about it around the pool table one dormitory afternoon after classes, and some blowhard called you out on your incredible unhipness in not knowing “kiss the sky.”

And so you became one of them, another blowhard smugly correcting the next generation of fools and secretly fearing that someone, some day, would recall that you had once been a fool yourself.

A New Interpretation

Let’s hope there’s less risk of blowhardiness about the 8th/9th century works of Liǔ Zōngyuán (柳宗元), whose “River Snow” poem PBS happens to be memorizing at the present time.

Here’s her liberal translation of the third line, which reads “孤舟蓑笠翁” / “gū zhōu suō lì wēng”:

[See post to listen to audio]

“zhōu” is that kind of “zhōu”, Hángzhōu, nèizhǒng “zhōu”
“Zhou” is that kind of “zhou”, Hangzhou [city], that kind of “zhou”

“gū zhōu” jiùshì¹ — it’s a teeny “zhōu”
“Gu zhou” is really — it’s a teeny “zhou”

W-E-N-G, wēng, gū zhōu suō lì wēng
翁 — 孤舟蓑笠翁
[reciting the third line of the poem]

gū zhōu suō lì wēng — let me thinking –

I’m thinking what that means

gū — zhōu — suō — lì — wēng

gū zhōu suō lì wēng — every day it’s getting smaller

suō lì! and it’s getting lower

suō lì wēng — that means, uh, even

it’s gonna — wēng — remember?

bumble bees go “wēng wēng wēng wēng…”

I think! Buzz?

The bumble bee says buzz — buzz buzz buzz?

“wēng,” that means “buzz.” And it’s getting like a

bumble bee’s buzz — that small of a town.

To paraphrase, the translation reduces to something like “a town becoming as small as the buzz of a bumble bee.”*

For a less authoritative translation, see this site:

A hundred mountains and no bird,
A thousand paths without a footprint;
A little boat, a bamboo cloak,
An old man fishing in the cold river-snow.

Does Mandarin have a /v/?

The BJS studios are all about 21st century language, not 9th, but there is a connection here. If you’ve spent any time in the capital (and as usual, I’m not sure how far this phenomenon extends geographically) you’ve probably done a double take as you heard somebody answer a cell phone and say “Véi?”

Véi?! Clearly the word is wéi in all the books. What’s more, Mandarin doesn’t even have a V, anywhere, right?

I’d always written it off to weird localism. And indeed you could say it is, if it’s not widespread. But it’s there, and not just in one word. That was what stuck out for me in “wēng” above. Several times there is a hint of a “vēng” to it. Here are a few instances pulled from the clip above:

[See post to listen to audio]

As with “green cauliflower” as a word for “broccoli”, I was wondering if the phenomenon was no more than a family tic until I recently came across this footnote from Chao p.20 in his Grammar of Spoken Chinese:

In the case of a final beginning with a semivowel [i, u, iu]… there is with some speakers a (non-distinctive) slightly more consonantal articulation… some speakers even use a non-frictional dentilabial [ʋ]** instead of [w] though this last phonetic feature is more common in Tianjin than in Beijing.

Any Tianjin folks out there who could vouch for the prevalence of this pronunciation?

Ah, good old Chao. So he knew way back in the day that the Beijing bumble bee (and maybe the Tianjin one as well) is likely to say “veng.” His book continues to demonstrate that Beijing Sounds will never discover something he hadn’t already carefully documented back in the 1960s. But fair enough — I should probably be thanking him. To be humble is an effective antidote to blowhardism.

———–

¹Like how much of that /sh/ is missing in jiùshì? Check out this post for more discussion about dropping /sh/, /zh/ etc.

*If anyone’s half as amused as I was, I’ll edit the sound file down so I can post her entire explication, including a reference to 10,000 dead people.

**i.e. something v-like but not exactly the English /v/ — I can’t figure out how to get the IPA symbol in there. Thanks, Kellen, for providing the symbol. You can listen to a textbook version of it here, both in initial and intervocalic positions

What is it?
A gathering, a feast (or at least minor indigestion), a chance to meet some BJS regulars.

The guest list will include Sima, of lír, línr, língr fame, Randy, of Chinglish and Echoes of Manchu renown. Both are coming all the way from 东北 for this great event. There will also be a Beijinger (well, since 1993) who has worked on the Mandarin speech recognition technology for a major software company.

If you’re going to be in the area, please don’t be shy. Event Security will NOT permit syz to record any Zhonglish/Chinglish without guests’ permission.

What do you get?
1. Grub
2. T-shirt? (if the production floor can get set up in time)
3. Possible cameos by Mrs. BJS and PBS (in sure-to-be-incredibly-shy form)

What’s it cost?
Nothing, if we don’t get carried away. (I’m docking the wages of the BJS staff to pay the bill.)

What’s the catch?
You gotta email syz (bjshengr -at- gmail -dot- com) to rsvp and find out the exact time and  location. Blame the reviled paparazzi for ruining public event planning for everyone.

Why?
1. Overdue birthday for Beijing Sounds
2. Syz’s first visit to Beijing in many months (want unrelenting depression? try November in Minnesota)
3. A quarter century since Nixon declared he wasn’t a crook.

Seriously, I’d be delighted to put faces to some of the names and pseudonyms around the studios. Shoot me an email if you might be able to come.

Here’s a bit of the guest lecture today at YU:

[See post to listen to audio]
[No sound? Click here]

sān jiā èr děngyú wǔ, yī jiā sān děngyú sì, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, wǔ jiā èr děngyú qī, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, yī jiā wǔ děngyú liù.
三加二等于五，一加三等于四， 四加二等于六，五加二等于七，四加二等于六，一加五等于六
3+2=5, 1+3=4, 4+2=6, 5+2=7, 4+2=6, 1+5=6

Rather elementary (first grade, in fact), but still a decent lecture, with extremely clear tones and a textbook example of 3rd-3rd tone sandhi (where the first of two consecutive third tones automatically becomes a second tone) on the last sum. Thereby

wǔ děngyú

becomes something that sounds like

wú děngyú

No doubt: I’m a YUniphile. But when reader Ellen writes in to ask for Mandarin study opportunities outside of YU…

I’ve been studying Mandarin for about 2 years as an adult learner in the States and am looking for an intensive summer program in China to focus on my speaking skills (my nightly prayer: dear any-power-that-is-listening, please, please help me with my tones). Do you have any to recommend to a middle-aged person determined to become marginally fluent? For business reasons, I’m inclined to look in Beijing but welcome suggestions in other places where there might be fewer English speakers.

… I have to admit I’m kind of at a loss, so she said I could pose the question to a wider audience. Does anyone out there have a recommendation?

Personally, my ideal program:

1. Forces communication. It should make the Zhonglish speaker get things done and get them done in Mandarin.

2. Involves Mandarin speakers who aren’t secretly trying to learn English. Common problem for native English speakers trying to learn any language — that their interlocutor is actually trying to use the opportunity to learn more English.

3. Emphasizes acquiring a reasonable level of competence in the spoken language before attempting to teach characters. Any curriculum teaching characters to beginners gets sent straight back to the dugout for some long, hard introspection.

Meeting these criteria is what makes YU so great — it certainly beats some of the alternatives cited earlier. However, some potential students may think the tuition is a bit steep.

Looking for ideas here, folks. Can anyone help?

Like kids? It might be useful to triangulate the scene about three weeks after PBS was born at the end of 2001.

Corner 1: Grandma/YU has moved in, newly arrived from Beijing two weeks before the birth, bringing to our hopelessly undisciplined household a wealth of detailed plans for maintaining cleanliness and saving money.

Corner 2: The world’s most tenaciously goal-oriented woman this side of Joan of Arc (i.e. Mrs. Beijing Sounds) is loaded with more hormones than a Texas beef steer and engaged in full-pitched battle with zuò yuèzi (坐月子 = the traditional Chinese period of confinement for women who have just given birth), which YU is attempting to impose.

Corner 3: Your writer, syz, whose previously tolerable bumbling has disintegrated into full-blown and unforgivable incompetence on every front, finds himself taking a second drink from the plastic jug of whiskey, well before noon, seriously contemplating for the first time in his life the potential advantages of alcoholism.

Somewhere in the middle is a small person pooping and screaming.

Just a week later, though, all that strife has faded into the nostalgic past. We are on our first trip out of the house, ever. It’s a clear December Sunday afternoon and we’ve made it to the mall. PBS sucks idly on her fingers as we descend the escalator to the first floor of the department store .

Or rather: we float down. Every eye in Fine Jewelry turns to us as we gently drift towards the first floor. “What a beautiful child! Amazing! Gorgeous. What penetrating intelligence!”

Why? Because I — the same father who four weeks earlier had been guffawing about our friend who was so enamored of his flat-headed pimple-faced crotchfruit — now hold in my arms the most beautiful female child (”girl” is just too prosaic) ever to grace the snowy Midwestern plains. Naturally everyone recognizes that and comments accordingly.

At least — that’s how I heard it at the time. And I’ll probably stick to the story in the face of all evidence.

More recent progeny

Fortunately, the Beijing Sounds baby (BJS) has a more experienced and objective parental unit.

First, he recognizes that BJS started off a bit on the homely side. To quote one of the kinder emails about the layout and formatting:

Subject: Beijing Sounds mini-rant

…just wish 1) it wasn’t a black background which makes it much harder to read… and 2) that when I increase the text size, the word wrap would function so that text doesn’t get cut out of the right side of the window.

Hmm, sure would be nice if we had saved some screenshots from those early days. Come to think of it, it’s not that different from the baby with acne and a deformed skull.

Second, as much as you’d hate to admit it, sometimes your baby does lack certain graces. Here’s William’s gentle hint that Baby might be a little slow in the characters department — a problem with 一减一加五等于无

Nice joke embedded in the hanzi, which give the result of the calculation as 无 wu2 nothing instead of 五 wu3 five.

All right, smartass, Baby doesn’t know characters but he knows SOUNDS, right? And sometimes he very observantly notices interesting things happen in the varied world of Mandarin pronunciation, such as interesting phonetic substitutions as in the L=N post, right?

Or, wrong, if you listen to the comments:

Zou Dong says: He pronounced lěngshuǐ which is right, just like the host did, not “něngshuǐ”

Sima says: Listening, now, to the separate recording, I’m afraid I’m going to have to switch sides. It really is an ‘L’.

Trevelyan says: Joining the chorus, I hear the “L” here too….

(If you really care, there’s more L=N in this post as well.)

The usual top-10 lists

Ah, well, we all love our babies, and BJS is no exception. So indulge this love-blind father for a little birthday celebration of his favorite moments:

10. Honest taxi drivers — because there are plenty out there. Sure, it’s a big city with bad eggs. But get your nose out of the stench! The only freedom you have is what you choose to focus on.

9. A no-nonsense teacher — because I’m amused by the difference in tenor between what she says and what an American teacher would say.

8. A chance encounter with a bird trainer — because it was this walk with my friend, and the trainer’s patient persistence, that inspired me to buckle down and become semi-literate.

7. CCTV — because it’s just priceless.

6. Guest posts here and here — because all this weird linguistic obsession has led not only to Echoes of Manchu, but to friendships as well.

5. Mandarin learning videos — because no Beijing sound compares to “Tone 1 as foghorn”.

4. Bay-Jing / Beizzhing — because it’s evidence that a little knowledge can generate a LOT of righteous smuggery. Get over it, folks! (The followups are here and here.)

3. Zhonglish — because so many struggling speakers needed a word to call their own, and this one we’ve managed to backdate to 1963. (More Zhonglish here and here)

2. Chinese facts, such as “characters are hard” (as explained by both foreigners and taxi drivers) — because almost everything you hear about the language is a myth.

1. Tāng v. Tāngr — because it’s a minimal pair straight from the street. The PBS/YU classic

But who cares what I think. For a more comprehensive view, I had the BJS studio analyst tally up the visits since February, when the incompetent technical team finally managed to install Google Analytics, after several false starts. He reports the most visited posts as follows:

10. Zhonglish: ulterior motives
9. L=N, a sound you won’t hear in Beijing
8. Zhonglish — ups and downs of tones in combination
7. 1.3 billion people speak what as a mother tongue?!
6. Read & write Mandarin: no characters required?
5. Where NOT to look for beginning Mandarin lessons
4. Does the Beijing-R mean anything?
3. Zhonglish — revenge of the non-native speaker
2. Beizhing, Pekin, whatever
1. A structured approach to Chinglish pronunciation

The top sources of traffic (which are awarded a 20% discount on BJS ads for the entire month of November):

5. Chinese Pod
4. Laowai Chinese
3. Google Reader
2. Language Log
1. StumbleUpon

A random selection of keywords that led to BJS in a web search

5. “beijing hua dictionary english” [how do multiple people come up with this one?]
4. Chinglish pronunciation [naturally enough]
3. Beizhing [excellent!]
2. Super Female [a lot of disappointed folks here]
1. Zhonglish [Has the term entered the mainstream?!]

Countries* whose visitors spent the most time per visit get their own list as well. Although the US and China had by far the most visits in terms of sheer quantity, the analyst decided that time-per-visit was a better measure of the quality required under the Constitutional mandate to “secure the Blessings of a Pit of philosophers for ourselves and our Posterity.” By this standard, Iceland deserves an honorable mention. At only 19 visits, it missed the cutoff, but the average visit timed out at a whoppin’ 12:48.

5. Netherlands (3:50 per visit)
4. Norway (4:10)
3. Spain (4:26)
2. Sweden (5:00)
1. Germany (7:08)

*Only those with 100+ visits for the year

Wasting time

Recently PBS has been memorizing 千字文 (qiānzìwén), the “Thousand Character Essay” from the sixth century. This memorization of poetry is an activity popular with the Chinese parental crowd, especially when the poetry is old. The trend initially struck a friend of mine as “completely ridiculous” and a waste of time. Although he is now reconsidering, in light of the ubiquity of classical Chinese references in modern society, his point about wasting time struck a nerve.

This blog, by the usual American definition, is a waste of time, with a negative ROI and a heavy opportunity cost (if you grant that there’s something valuable I could be doing with my time, which might well be a stretch). Learning Mandarin as an adult is a waste of time too, as others have analytically pointed out

But pretty much everything important will get classified as a waste of time if you insist on valuing the wrong things. The mystics have been pointing this out for millenia, and their advice applies even if you have a hard time attaining the transcendent.

So here’s to another year of wasting time on Beijing Sounds, and I’ll close with an echo of that first post for which I had recorded a lot that I didn’t really understand. The following is a sound I may never understand, in a rendition of the first part of 千字文 that clocks at about Mach 3. I’m afraid it may lack the gravitas you’d expect from this Genesis-like beginning:

“The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless.”

[That translation comes from here, where you can see more explication as well. The writing below comes from here, which also has a full and slower audio version of the poem.]

In any case, it’s a sound, and it’s from Beijing.

[See post to listen to audio]
[No sound? Click here]
天地玄黄　宇宙洪荒
日月盈昃　辰宿列张
寒来暑往　秋收冬藏
闰馀成岁　律吕调阳
云腾致雨　露结为霜
金生丽水　玉出昆冈
剑号巨阙　珠称夜光
果珍李柰　菜重芥姜
海咸河淡　鳞潜羽翔
龙师火帝　鸟官人皇
始制文字　乃服衣裳
推位让国　有虞陶唐
吊民伐罪　周发殷汤
坐朝问道　垂拱平章
爱育黎首　臣伏戎羌
repeats (爱育黎首　臣伏戎羌)
遐迩一体　率宾归王
鸣凤在竹　白驹食场
化被草木　赖及万方
盖此身发　__大五常
恭惟鞠养　岂敢毁伤
女慕贞洁　男效才良
知过必改　得能莫忘
罔谈彼短　靡恃己长
信使可复　器欲难量
墨悲丝染　诗赞羔羊
景行维贤　克念作圣…

“That house I sold in June. Yeah, I sold it at a loss, but I took the blow and look at me now! Sitting in my rental, calling the manager the second the faucet threatens to drip and subscribing to every Sky-is-Falling economic blog I can put my mouse on.

More like schadenfreude, I suppose, and, yes, you are annoying but probably not as annoying as the Californian who sold his house in 2007.

Economics has a way of exacting its revenge one way or another. You come down off your fatuous high and start pissing and moaning about the bailout for Wall Street, feeding off of your Main Street money, and about the politicians who can’t seem to find another metaphor to save their political hides. Then you abuse a metaphor of your own, thinking about those fat cats…

Hey, but do you really think they’re fat? The people on Wall Street, that is. No, I mean: really, fat? Like, corpulent?

The Beijing Sounds theory of the month (BJS TOTM™) for October is that Beijingers (maybe just those over 60) really think bosses are fat. Truly. Literally. How else would you explain the following little incident? It’s YU talking about visiting some friends and seeing a photo on their computer of a mutual acquaintance:

[See post to listen to audio]
[No sound? Click here]

Nèi tiān zài tāmen jiā jīsuànjī shàng kànjian
那天在他们家计算机上看见
That day at their house on the computer (I) saw

Wà! Biàn de pàng! Āiyōuwei. Jiù gēn yī dà lǎobǎn yīyàng
哇！ 变得胖！ 哎哟喂！ 就跟一大老板一样
Wow! He’d gotten fat! Oh my gosh. Just like a big boss

This is all quite literal, no question. Given that it is, and she’s just trying to say that the fellow was genuinely fat, the English comparison would have to be fat like a pig, maybe an elephant…. But definitely not a boss. It’s not that “bosses are fat” would be insulting, just nonsensical.

Makes you wonder how many other Beijingers would have the “bosses are fat” association top of mind. I’m still guessing it’s a generational thing. You have to be old enough to have been through some years of real deprivation to retain the belief that getting fat takes money, and only big bosses have the money it takes to do it. Surely there used to be such an association among English speakers. Thus we still talk about the fatcats. But we’ve lost the metaphoric oomph that having actually been hungry used to provide people when using the term.

There’s another good tidbit here, an idea I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Listen to that tāmen in the first line. Pretty darned close to “tām jiā”, wouldn’t you say? It’s not the best example of the phenomenon (keep in mind the BJS Studios have been closed this week and the head archivist is vacationing in a dark corner of the Shangdi subway stop), but the clip is enough to get the conversation started.

The phenomenon is, basically, that the -en of tāmen, wǒmen, zánmen (他们， 我们， 咱们) just sort of disappears, and so you’re left with three words that end in M, which is not “supposed to be” possible in the syllable structure of Mandarin. That is, syllables aren’t supposed to end with M. But in these rare cases, they seem to.

That was my observation, way back when I first started here at Yuèmǔ U. But I kept it to myself. Original observations are great, and everyone wants to have them. The danger is that they are sometimes too original. I’ve come up with a lot of things that seem to exist only in my own head.

So it’s nice to have somebody provide independent confirmation, especially when that somebody is a renowned expert who knows the literature inside and out. That would be Yuen Ren Chao (赵元任), of course.

He makes a comment about tāmen=>tām in his classic, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, which still graces my (disgracefully messy) dinner table. It’s in a section (p.54) on vowels, and the decision he’s trying to make is whether to say that there is only one a phoneme in Mandarin. Or are there two?

For the most part, one a seems to do the trick.

The low vowel-phoneme a has a medium quality in open syllables, affronted quality before front endings (-i, -n) and a back quality before back endings (-o, -ng).*

In other words, for example, ta, tan and tang may not have exactly the same a sound, but the a always changes in a predictable way in the context of the subsequent sound, so the sound difference isn’t significant to the speaker.

However, he comes up with an astounding (to me) minimal pair that would seem to make the case that spoken Mandarin actually does distinguish between two different a sounds:

tāmen bù lái
他们不来
they are not coming

tān bù lái
怹不来
he (honorific) is not coming

Wow. Several things.

1. You have to note, and he does explain this in the book, that in rapid speech the -en in the first sentence gets dropped (just as in the recording above) AND the -n in tān bù lái changes into an -m in a natural process of assimilation because it is followed by the b- of bù lái. (Similarly, MBA and NBA sound the same when spoken at conversational speeds.) The end result is that both sentences look like: tām bù lái

2. BUT, he is claiming that a native speaker, listening to these sentences spoken, would in fact be able to distinguish them by the quality of the first a of tām v. tān(m). I’ll take him at his word, for now, but that’s a claim worth testing.

3. I had no idea that the honorific third person male singular (”he” = tān, 怹) even existed. Strike one blow against the windmill of ignorance.

In the end, Chao decides not to introduce two different a phonemes into his grammar. Instead he deals with this minimal pair by treating the -m as a syllable by itself. But that’s a bit of a technical detail. For today, I’m vindicated in having identified a phenomenon that at least one other person in the world has believed in! 金六福 for everyone, on the house!

*Sorry, Gwoyeu Romatzyh fans. I’ve converted his GR to Pinyin

Like a cask of Amontillado, the deep recesses of the studio’s cold storage facility have been preserving the following recording for just this sort of occasion. It features the voice of the very same taxi driver made famous last March by his blunt assessment of Chinese characters: Pò zìr! (破 字儿 = lousy characters). At some point in that conversation, I asked him for an example of real Beijing dialect that outsiders wouldn’t know. The recording starts with him hesitating (SJ = sījī, 司机，driver), then coming up with some serious R-fulness:

[See post to listen to audio]

_{[No sound? Click here]}
Yě méiyǒu shénme…shénme “jiǎn lòur” nǐ dǒng ma?
也没有什么。。。什么捡漏儿你懂吗？
Well there’s not really anything… well do you understand “jiǎn lòur”?

Me: Jiélòur

SJ: Jiǎn lòngr* lòur — ā bùdǒng ba.
捡漏儿啊不懂吧
jiǎn lòur — oh, you don’t understand

Me: Bùdǒng
不懂
No

SJ: Hǎoduō — nǐ xiǎng qù nèixiē gǔwán shìchǎng
好多，你想去那些古玩市场
A lot — you want to go to one of those curio markets

nǐ dǒng ma? Jiùhuò shìchǎng
你懂吗？ 旧货市场
You understand? Second-hand market

Nǐ qù jiùhuò mǎide yī xiē gǔwán zìhuà shénmede
你在旧货买的一些古玩字画什么的
You go to the second-hand shop and buy some curio, calligraphy, whatever

Nǐ huāde hěn xiǎode qián mǎile yīyàngr hěn tēbié chènxīn de dōngxi
你花得很小的钱买了一样儿很特别称心的东西
You spend just a little money to buy some really fine thing

Xiànle piányi le. Zhèi jiào piányi lòur
现了便宜了。 这叫便宜漏儿
You feel like it’s cheap. That’s called a cheap “leak” [i.e. a good deal]

*Update to correct spelling of lòur. Shows how I was confused about what word/sound it was when first transcribing — then forgot to correct it before posting.

I had to consult my only friend available (non-Beijinger but 东北) on the word itself. Couldn’t find it in any dictionary via the usual methods. Kept trying “long” or “lo”, but missed the obvious lòu (漏 = leak).

So his analysis? He agrees that the driver’s given us pretty good Běijīnghuà — hardly anyone would hear the term and understand it out of context unless they’re long-time Beijingers. The nuance, he says, is something of the impression that you’ve discovered a deal so good it’s almost got to be someone’s mistake. If I was to apply YU experience, I’d hazard a guess that it’s related to this common practice among the Facilities personnel: turn on the spigot to just enough of a drip that you can slowly fill a bucket over the course of the day, but not enough of a flow that it actually gets the water meter running. This way you’ve got water aplenty, and the price is just right. Jiǎn lòur indeed!

Here, listen for yourself. I stitched together the three times she says the word in the longer clip below.

[See post to listen to audio]

_{[No sound? Click here]}

Is it just idiolect variation, or did ABC get it wrong?

Either way I love ABC, and all the bluster is really just praising with faint damnation because the ABC dictionary, with its basis in pinyin, is indispensable around the Beijing Sounds studios, especially in combination with the technology of the absolutely superb Pleco dictionary (which offers the ABC, the Oxford dictionary, and others) that resides on my PDA. I have been meaning for months to give Pleco some real estate on Beijing Sounds so that through the enormous volume of traffic they might enjoy at least a small fraction of the comforts of financial security that this enterprise has afforded us here at the studios. They deserve every bit of it not just because they have good technology but because every interaction I have with them (e.g. reinstalling the dictionary on a new PDA after my old one met its maker at the hands of a tile floor) reinforces my belief in their fundamental devotion to customers.

Can’t afford a Pleco? Sell the family jewels and your firstborn and get one. ‘Nuf said.

So back to bachelorhood, which is still the state of affairs at the makeshift Beijing Sounds studios here in Minnesota. As with the last recipe installment, the question continues to arise a couple of times a day: what to eat? The U. always has suggestions, and you can bet they don’t involve opening a can or looking over the takeout menus. How about: eggs with spinach?

[See post to listen to audio]

_{[No sound? Click here]}
炒那白菜 菠菜叶儿. 拿鸡蛋
Chǎo nèi báicài [ye] bócài yèr. Ná jīdàn.
Fry the cabbage [uh] the spinach leaves. Take the eggs.

一炒往里头放一点儿菠菜
Yī chǎo wǎng lǐtou fàng yīdiǎnr bócài
Once they’re fried put in a bit of spinach.

然后就放一点儿盐就成。别的什么都不用放
Ránhou jiù fàng yīdiǎnr yán jiù chéng. Biéde shénme dōu bùyòng fàng
Then put in just a bit of salt is good enough. You don’t need to put in anything else.

先炒鸡蛋啊。把鸡蛋成出来 [not entirely sure on this]
Xiān chǎo jīdàn a. Bǎ jīdàn chéng chūlai.
First fry the eggs. Then take out the eggs.

然后呢就那个你就把菠菜一炒把鸡蛋…
Ránhòu ne jiù nèige nǐ jiù bǎ bócài yī chǎo bǎ jīdàn…
Then you just take the — just put the spinach just fry it and put the egg…

往里头一搀，放一点儿盐，一出来就成。不用放别的
wǎng lǐtou yī chān, fàng yī diǎnr yán, yī chūlai jiù chéng. Bùyòng fàng biéde.
in and stir, put in a little salt, just take it out and done. No need to put in anything else.

一点儿北京话

It is Beijing Sounds, so you can’t get away without a little bit of rolled tongue/Beijing-R/érhuàyīn. As I keep transcribing yīdiǎnr (一点儿 = “a little bit” said the Beijing way), it’s worth noting that I don’t recall the professor of Yuèmǔ U., a lifelong Beijinger, ever uttering that pǔtōnghuà standard, “yīdiǎndiǎn” (一点点 = a little bit). And of course she says bócài yèr (菠菜叶儿) instead of bócài yèzi or something of the sort. As always, I’m wondering how far this extends outside Beijing.

On the whole bócài vs. bōcài thing, I don’t mean to get sucked into another vegetable discussion, but they just keep coming up. In the last recipe episode, it was the two words for broccoli (lǜcàihuār / 绿菜花儿 vs. xīlánhuār / 西兰花儿）. The comment from Chris seemed to establish pretty unequivocally that both are legit although xīlánhuār is probably more formal. For bócài, all you need to do is to print out the characters, get your favorite Mandarin speaker to blurt it out, then leave a comment about what you hear.

What about the Zhei/Nei thing, then? In the last recipe I got kind of carried away with it. Trouble is: it’s still eating me. In the comments last time, Randy offered some good rules that seem to apply pretty well to what we hear in this fine capital. But out of curiosity about the world beyond, I’m going to keep asking for more info until someone gives in and makes some recordings from outside Beijing. What’s it gonna take? Stock in BJS? Hey, that’s worth more than AIG tomorrow anyway. But how about just dinner? To quote from the previous fee dinner offer:

Zhèi, Nèi — What’s beyond Beijing?

As you can hear in the recording, the Yuèmǔ U Beijing campus adheres pretty closely to the hútòngr pronunciation of “zhèi, nèi” (这，那 = this, that) instead of “zhè, nà” (which is the pǔtōnghuà standard as far as I know, although both spellings do appear to work in the IME that I’m using). At the Beijing Sounds Studios we’ve always been interested in finding a map of how far zhèi/nèi extends beyond the capital. So as part of our Frequent Reader Award Program (FRAP), a free hand-crafted shrimp dinner, cooked in the kitchenette outside the Beijing Sounds studio, is being offered to anyone who can find an authoritative source.

Barring that, if you feel inspired, take a minute to record some local speech wherever you are in Mandarin Country, count up the zhèi/nèi vs. zhè/nà and send it all in (bjshengr -at- gmail -dot- com). Just make sure you get some background on where the speaker grew up. If I can make any sense of it, I’ll post the whole muddle as a starting hypothesis.

Let me know what you’ve got, and send in those blurry* egg-with-spinach pics!

– syz

*hey, it’s the world’s worst cook and photographer in a running battle with high heat — what can you expect?