OT - Beizhing?

Far be it from me to defend TV news in the USA, but I don't think it's that simple. Sure, in Pinyin it's spelled Beijing, but the consonant represented by the J in Beijing just doesn't exist in any dialect of English I'm familiar with (or, for that matter, any European language I'm at all familiar with.)

/Lew

According to one college textbook (Integrated Chinese, Tao-chung Yao, Yuehua Liu et all) "J is an unaspirated voiceless palatal affricate." (whatever the hell that means). "To produce this sound, first raise the front of the tongue to the hard palate and press the tip of the tongue against the back of the lower teeth, and then loose the tongue and let the air squeeze out throught the channel thus made. It is unaspirated and the vocal cords do not vibrate. Note that the Chinese j is similar to English j but unvoiced and articulated, with the tip of the tongue resting behind the lower incisors."

Jim, the tongue twister

PS Im going to pay attention to this sound when I see it on CCTV. You'll see the PinYin scroll when they do names,places,things.

Lewis Per>

If you're like me, you'll find imitating the CCTV announcer is much easier than convincing your mouth to follow directions from phonological jargon.

By the way, one weird thing about Pinyin I forgot to mention is that the consonant mapped to the Pinyin ZH is *very* similar to the normal English J sound (think of the word "joy".)

/Lew

Its pretty hard carrying around a college text book in Chinatown. I carry a pocket tourist guide with the pinyin pronunciation guide in front not because it would help any tourist but a reminder for me who has already done some homework. The zh sound is almost a giveme from zhongguo used on CCTV. Of course Beijing is every other word on CCTV now.

PS I saw a CCTV piece yesterday on gourmet coffee shops in Beijing. Ironically a respite from the maddening crowds just like I would expect from a tea shoppe here. Also CCTV is doing some adlib studio interviews with Chinese culture experts if you think the mass drumming spectacle was not frightening enough. I cant figure out where they get the various young 20 something Westerners doing on the street interviews speaking Chinese when necessary.

Jim

Lewis Per>

...homework...

I thought I heard Bob Costas say "BEI JING" last night, but either I misheard or he accidentally said it more-or-less correctly; he went back to "bay-zhing" for the rest of the night.

Lew, I've never been able to make sense of the phonological directions. Even sounds I already know how to make!

Alan

If you go to

and follow the links in the table headed "In Mandarin Chinese there are 21 initial sounds:" that explain terms like "palatal", "retroflex", and so on, you can get an idea of the difference between J and ZH, among other things.

The whole site

is good on a lot of aspects of Mandarin phonology, but I think the author sometimes gets sloppy when picking sounds in English to compare Mandarin sounds to.

/Lew

For proper phonology you've got to get the xray pictures of the skull and tongue, drawings for the squeamish. How does a native Chinese speaker know how to pronounce a character they've never seen before? At what point in the Chinese education system are you weaned off Bopomofo?

Jim

Lewis Per>

In general, I don't think they can. But often part of a character will give a phonetic clue, and I'm sure a person with a large spoken vocabulary can parlay the context from surrounding characters into a well-educated guess. I wish that described me!

Isn't that used only in Taiwan? I think they use Pinyin on the mainland.

/Lew

Yeah - bopomofo (zhuyin) is only in Taiwan, and even there, there are competing systems. According to Wikipedia, Tongyong Pinyin

I think kids in mainland China use Hanyu Pinyin until they're at least 6 or so, before they start studying characters.

So the elementary teacher would use the romanized characters 'cha2' (or rising tone) for pronunciation of the tea character? I thought modern Chinese are ignorant of PinYin. I also thought the mapped 37 phonetic symbols Zhuyin FuHao keyboard is mainly used by mainland Chinese as well as Taiwan.

Jim

Will Yardley wrote:

Right or more likely cha with an acute accent.

I don't claim to be an expert, but I don't think it's common. There are some keyboard input systems other than hanyu pinyin; my Mac (which has a zhuyin input method for traditional characters) only has 3 possible input modes for simplified ones:

ITABC (i.e., Hanyu pinyin) Wubi Xing

From talking to some people, I think pinyin is the input method used by most younger mainland Chinese people, either on computers or mobile devices. The other methods are faster if you are experienced, but sound like they take more effort to learn.