Chinese thread

[Rui]

Huh I never really thought about the phonetic values of the nasalized vowels... I speak with a Beijing accent and always assumed it was just [V~] but actually your analysis fits my pronunciation way better.

(Though I'm still non-native, I do get told I have a fairly Beijing-ish accent, anyway. Makes sense since I learned Mandarin in Beijing. I nasalize vowels as you described them, i.e. with that nasalized unrunded vowel afterward)

[Qwynegold]

It feels like I'm never gonna fully learn the pronunciation. :/ Like the other a friend of mine taught me that initial+o is pronunced initial+[uo]. I had no idea, and had not noticed it in any Chinese person's speech before.

If you go by the IPA in the Pinyin page on Wikipedia, you'll end up with a good approximation of "accentless" Putonghua (i.e., perceived as "accentless" in the PRC).

Aha, I was thinking of looking through that carefully. Though I have been fearing that I will learn things wrong. I often make the mistake of pronouncing things the way I expect them to be pronounced, rather than listening to how others pronounce and imitating that. Btw, my friend said that finals with -n are realized nasalized. It was unclear if it was just [V~] or [V~n]. But judging from the phonology page on WP, it seems like this doesn't always have to be so.

My anecdotal, unscientific impression is that [Vn] and [V~n] would be "accentless", [V~ɨ~] tends toward Beijing (I guess the more drawl-like you say it, the more Beijing it becomes), and monophthong [V~] would be perceived as non-Beijing and dialectal.

Same for [Vŋ], [V~ŋ], versus [V~ɯ~], versus [V~].

I have a little difficulty parsing this. :S Is this correct?

/Vn/ is [V~1~] in Beijingese. In other dialects it can be [Vn], [V~n] or [V~].
/VN/ is [V~M\~] in Beijingese, and [VN], [V~N] or [V~] in other dialects (with the last option making it merge with /Vn/).

Or did you mean the light tone by accentless?

[Ran]

By "accentless" I mean a flat, bland, standardized accent that does not betray your geographical origins, kind of like "General American" in the U.S. or, from what I understand, the Standard German spoken in northern Germany.

Should be like this:

/Vn/ is [V~1~] in Beijingese. It is [Vn], [V~n] in "accentless" Putonghua. [V~] is clearly "accented" (I think many regions would have this, but it is certainly not "accentless".)

/VN/ is [V~M\~] in Beijingese. It is [VN], [V~N] in "accentless" Putonghua. Again, [V~] is clearly "accented".

[V~] from /n/ and [V~] from /N/ do not have to merge since (1) some dialects would change /n/ but not /N/ or vice versa and (2) even if both /n/ and /N/ are changed, it's possible that the distinction is maintained in the vowel. Here is an example (sorry for the improvised Romanization):

Nanjing dialect
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8D%97% ... C%E8%A9%B1
Beijing an, ang = Nanjing a~
Beijing uan, uang = Nanjing ua~
Beijing iang = Nanjing ia~
Beijing ian = Nanjing ie~
Beijing üan = Nanjing üe~
Beijing en, eng = Nanjing en(g) [merged, free variation]
Beijing in, ing = Nanjing in(g) [merged, free variation]
Beijing uen = Nanjing uen
Beijing ün = Nanjing ün
Beijing ong = Nanjing ong
Beijing iong = Nanjing iong

As you can see the correspondences are all over the place, with some rimes merging and some not, but in the case of the first five rows at least, a 50-year-old speaker from Nanjing might speak Putonghua using [V~] ("Hi I am from Na~jing") and that would sound like a regional accent to a person from Beijing. Whereas a 15-year-old speaker from Nanjing who grew up watching national TV and speaks Putonghua "without an accent" (in layman terms) would say [Vn] or [V~n].

[KathTheDragon]

By "accentless" I mean a flat, bland, standardized accent that does not betray your geographical origins, kind of like "General American" in the U.S. or, from what I understand, the Standard German spoken in northern Germany.

I think "non-dialectal" vs. "dialectal" would work better here. Or something like that.

[Ser]

"neutral"

[Qwynegold]

[snip]

Okay, thank you!

[zompist]

I decided after 12 years to work on my page of Faye Wong translations.

I'm hung up on the second of these lines. (I include the previous line for context.)

我心我情如旧
Wǒ xīn wǒ qíng rú jiù
My heart is as it was before

人儿他人儿是否依然
Rénr tā rénr shìfǒu yīrán
(gloss:) people child he/him people child whether still

I don't even understand the construction (there seems to be no verb? What is 他 doing there?).

[M Mira]

I decided after 12 years to work on my page of Faye Wong translations.

I'm hung up on the second of these lines. (I include the previous line for context.)

我心我情如旧
Wǒ xīn wǒ qíng rú jiù
My heart is as it was before

人儿他人儿是否依然
Rénr tā rénr shìfǒu yīrán
(gloss:) people child he/him people child whether still

I don't even understand the construction (there seems to be no verb? What is 他 doing there?).

I checked the web, and it seems that it should be 人儿他 人儿他是否依然, with 人儿他 repeated for lyrical purposes, it seems.

人儿 means someone's lover, but I think it's quite old-fashioned.
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I don't know what it's called, but appending a third person pronoun after a noun that refers to a person or people in agent or possessor position is a rather natual habit for me, but it's not compulsory and doesn't mean anything. e.g.

小明不在
小明他不在
Xiaoming isn't here.

這枝筆是小明的
這枝筆是小明他的
This pen is Xiaoming's.

小明把車開走了
小明他把車開走了
Xiaoming drove the car away.

這是微軟的問題
這是微軟他們的問題
This is Microsoft's problem. (微軟 refers to the group of people working there, hence plural)

Either in the pair sounds natural to me and I don't feel any noticeable difference.
-----
You're right that there isn't a proper verb there, two probable explanation are either that the writer used 依然 as if it's a verb with his artistic license (something like "whether he's still the same"), or the verb is omitted for poetic effect (sth like "whether he still loves me").

[zompist]

Cool, based on that and the context of the song I'm going to assume it means something like "Does (my) loved one still feel the same?"

I checked the original lyrics booklet and you're right. Just 人儿他... makes more sense— along with your examples it's a clear topic + subject construction. Curiously this is something Mandarin shares with French. (And occasionally colloquial English.)