Happy nerdy days

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My inner nerd has two reasons to rejoice today.

First, I’ve finally gotten around to activating my remote access to the ProQuest system.  The world of journal articles is now mine again! (In the process, I noticed that even non-alumni can pay for alumni membership, of which–in my mind–this is the greatest privilege. You can’t do it as cheaply as recent grads can.  Still, given an individual journal article purchase rate of something like $20-$40, your if your inner nerd has grandiose ambitions, it might get its money’s worth pretty quickly.)

Second, Daan van Esch has a beta version of the Leiden Weibo Corpus up and running.  It currently consists of all the messages posted on Sina Weibo (think Chinese Twitter equivalent) in January, 2012.  Search options include word, grammatical structure, English translation of a word, region or city, and gender of poster. Although one month’s data may not sound like much, that’s 5.1 million messages.  Even if the average post length is only 10 characters, that’s already a quarter of the size of Jun Da’s Modern Chinese corpus–with a lot more information available to the user. (Any one know how many characters are in Google’s ngram for Chinese?) It’s also the only freely available corpus of informal Chinese that I know of.

 

Pop quiz

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Since I’m on the topic of sound changes that leave us poor foreigners utterly confused … test your Dongbei dialect knowledge here. Someone says to you “yér”. What word are they saying?

Edit: As Randy Alexander points out in the comments, context would be incredibly helpful here. As mental context, anyone who has ever studied Mandarin has learned the standard pronunciation of the word that I had in mind when I wrote this post. Which is not to say that there aren’t other words that also end up with this pronunciation. Would it really be Chinese if there weren’t at least a few?

Sweet elision

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Although generalizations are dangerous, I’d guess that all languages have elision in some form–that is, that perfectly good language sounds just disappear in certain contexts, with fast, informal speech being a pretty good place to start looking. It’s really common in spoken Mandarin (you can hear it in action over at Beijing Sounds). The ability of perfectly good retroflex fricatives, for example, to disappear into nothingness never ceases to amaze me. When I realize it’s happened. It also never ceases to confuse me.

For example: the hotel cleaning lady knocked on my door, asking me if I needed any clothes washed. The do not disturb light is apparently meaningless, as this has happened 3 days in a row now, but I digress. I told her no, and she responded with something I initially processed as “duì bu qǐ, several words you don’t know, le”. But in retrospect, I think what she really said was “duì bu qǐ máfan nǐ le”. (对不起麻烦你了, Sorry to bother you.) Only, what she really, really said was “duì bu qǐ máa nǐ le”. Farewell, /f/. Farewell, /n/. At least, I think the /n/ went away too, although since the next word started with /n/, it’s a little hard to say for sure.

This sets up a nice tonal contrast with the word “mǎshàng” (马上, right away), which is often elided to “mǎàng” and, to my ear anyway, sometimes all the way to “mǎà”

Yes, that’s má.a vs. mǎ.à. I think, in both cases, the second syllable retains a nasalized vowel. Both, incidentally, still sound bisyllabic, but it’s only, or primarily, the tone change that indicates the syllable break. In my own nerdy way, I find this really cool. Can anyone confirm for me whether or not it’s for real?

side note: post title inspired by the resemblance between the words elision and Elysian. But for the record, elision comes from Latin and Elysian from Greek, so the apparent resemblance is of no significance. But we were talking about Chinese.

Dalian dialect and tone… we'll optimistically call this Part 1

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Better late than never, I decided to attempt to pursue the no-longer-so recent statements on Language Log about Dalian dialect (or topolect, as Victor Mair, the author of the post, more accurately calls it).

The discussion arose as the result of a sign in Dalian that was full of mysterious and wonderful Chinglish, all of which turned out to be the fault of Google Translate. Of interest to the post at hand, the vendor was selling 火勺, which Google Translate unhelpfully renders as “fire spoon”. What is this mysterious 火勺, if not a device for moving coals around? It’s actually a type of 饼, but apparently this food, or possibly just the name, isn’t widely found in China. What other parts of China do have is 火烧. The question raised in the Language Log post is whether 火勺 could be a local rendering of 火烧. In standard Mandarin, 火勺 is pronounced huǒsháo and 火烧 huǒshāo. In other words, the only difference between the two is the tone on the second syllable. The first has a rising tone; the second has a high level tone. We foreigners would confuse the two in a heartbeat, but we’d expect that Chinese speakers would be able to keep their tones straight.

But … welcome to the wonderful world of dialectology. Even in Mandarin speaking areas, there’s a vast range of pronunciation. Standard Mandarin is taught in schools. What’s spoken in the home and on the street may sound drastically different. My general impression from flipping through a book about Chinese dialects a long time ago (somebody better start fact checking me here) is that the tones can be highly variable; go to another village and you’ll get another set of tones.

According to Mair, Dalian dialect has no rising tone. Rising (second) tone words are pronounced as either first (high level) or fourth (falling) tone. So of course, having no actual second tone, Dalian speakers might substitute second tone 勺 for first tone 烧 when writing down the name of this food.

But is it true? In an attempt to find out, I finally decided to ask an native Dalian-ren. (Well, ok, my husband finally decided to ask–good thing, as this report is undoubtedly more accurate with the help of his Chinese in the conversation.) He had certainly heard of 火勺–and was surprised that we had never tried it. He said there was no such thing as 火烧–he assumed that I was getting it confused with 烧饼. Definite point in favor of the “local name for a more widely eaten food” theory.

But did this result from a tone confusion? When asked how 火勺 is pronounced in Dalian dialect, he gave us a (heavily er-huaed) huǒsháo. In subsequent conversation about the food, I could be convinced that shao was toneless (as it’s “supposed to” be in Dalian), but in isolation, there was definitely a (supposedly non-existent) rising tone. We asked a few more questions about how various words are pronounced and got some second tones and some non-second tones where standard Mandarin has second tones. But if anything, there was a tendency to turn second tones into third tones, not first or fourth tones. For example, when asked how rénmínlù would be pronounced in Dalian dialect, we heard yěnmínlù. (That’s third-second instead of second-second.) When we asked directly about tones in Dalian dialect, we were told that second tones are seldom used and fourth tones are emphasized. So initial research suggests that, if there has been a local transformation in writing from 火烧 to 火勺, Dalian dialect is not to blame.

Now, the linguists among you are probably feeling a little skeptical about my conclusions at this point, and you should be. This is why I’m optimistically calling this “Part 1″. Potential problems with my data:

- Although the Chinese person we asked is native to Dalian, he can speak fairly standard Mandarin, and did so during this conversation. This might affect his rendering of Dalian dialect.

- He might not even call himself a Dalian-ren (someone who’s native to Dalian) because at least one of his grandparents is from Shandong. This might be significant for our purposes since he lived with his grandparents for much of his life. He certainly speaks something that is not standard Mandarin when speaking to people who speak local dialects–but perhaps we’re getting some Shandong dialect thrown in with the Dalian dialect.

- He doesn’t self-report tones very accurately, so it’s possible that his opinions about Dalian tones are not actually referring to the tones we think they’re referring to, and even if they are they might or might not descriibe actual patterns in the dialect. (It’s pretty typical for people who haven’t been trained to describe language to be pretty inaccurate when they try to do so.)

- A sample size of one is always reason for skepticism.

More research to come, I hope, but don’t hold your breath waiting …

Cesarean Sections in Chinese

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That the c-section rate in China is remarkably high is no secret. I’ve heard various theories about this–doctors like convenience, patients like convenience, patients like auspicious birth dates and times, hospitals like money, there’s no risk to a second pregnancy since there won’t be one … probably all factors, but I digress. This is supposed to be a language blog, after all.

So instead, I present unto all the passionate natural birth advocates out there a new method of discouraging c-sections: a little vocabulary lesson. C-section in Chinese is 剖腹产. Seppuku is 剖腹. Given the amount of attention people here pay to lucky dates and so forth, and given that language seems to play a huge role in determining what is lucky, you’d think that a method of being born that sounds like a way to commit suicide would be the ultimate inauspicious entry into the world. But what do I know?

Of course 剖腹 also has the more mundane meaning of cutting a stomach open. But still.

Context is everything

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I went to pick my daughter up from school the other day, and another student’s grandmother decided to chat with me. Or try, anyway. She asked me a question. I probably actually knew all the words she used, but my brain fixated on the word “ban”. I thought to myself, “Aha! She wants to know what class my daughter is in.” I answered that my daughter was in “yīng yī bān”. But even as I was formulating my answer, my brain was sending out all sorts of warning signals that my answer didn’t match her question very well. I thought a little more and realized that she had actually been asking me whether my daughter attended school for half days (“bàn tiān”). So I apologized and answered her question again, telling her that yes, my daughter only attended half days because she was still small. Or at least I think I answered her question. At this point, she gave up on trying to talk to me. So maybe I should have been looking for yet another “ban”.

Chinese has lots and lots and lots of homonyms. And if, like most foreigners, your tones are only so-so, you can multiply that by a factor of four. I find that, for myself, I do a reasonably ok job of picking out tone if I’m listening for tone (like if someone teaches me a new word), and I think I even do an ok job of producing it as long as I’ve memorized the word correctly. However, the careful reader (and/or actual Chinese speaker) will notice that in real life, this falls apart: I don’t pay much attention to tone when I’m also trying to carry on a conversation. If I’m using it to identify words, it’s not at a conscious level. In this case, ‘bān’ and ‘bàn’ aren’t actually homonyms, so in theory the whole problem should have been avoided. But for the near future at least, unless I can find myself some really good listening training, I’m probably much better off paying attention to context, which does a much better job of disambiguating anyway.

Context is … everything?

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My daughter’s preschool sent her home one day with piece of paper containing a short announcement. After reading through it several times, I realized there was only one word I didn’t know: 组织. I looked at it. It looked familiar. I even thought I could pronounce it. But I just couldn’t quite manage to retrieve it from the depths of my brain, so I looked it up in the dictionary and found it meant “organize”. My projected pronunciation was off, but only slightly, so I figured the characters must actually be slightly different from those of some word I did know.

Several days later, I was flipping through flashcards and up popped 组织. Immediately, I identified it as “tissue”–as in, a part of the body. It was only then that I realized that these were the same characters I had failed to recognize a few days before. In fact I should have recognized them. Although my flashcard program automatically fills in dictionary definitions, and “to organize” was in fact the first one, I’d only ever really paid attention to the definition I filled in myself. As far as I was concerned, 组织 meant ’tissue’–and nothing else.

So why did I successfully identify the word immediately the second time I saw it? Was it because I had the non-context context of my set of flashcards (even if my deck does number over 2000 unique words/phrases)? Or was it, perhaps, that the my brain rebelled against recognizing something it thought meant “body tissue” in the context of a school field trip?

In which I fail real life progress tests

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I actually wrote this post a long time ago but never got around to putting it up. Since I have a few more posts planned on context, I though this might be a good time to post it.

…

My language learning comes along in fits and starts these days. It’s good enough to get around but light years away from being able to really communicate. We went home for Christmas, my child care quit, and so my language lessons did too. And it’s too easy to say that since I can walk into a store and get something I want by describing it, if I don’t happen to know the word, that must be enough. Until I get thrown into a social situation where I’m supposed to use Chinese, and then I’m reminded how meager my skills really are. But really, I need something more than a few language lessons to get me through these kind of situations. It’s no longer just a test of my vocabulary and grammar; it’s a test of, perhaps, how deeply the language has worked its way into my brain. For example:

Have you ever noticed that, when you first hear an unfamiliar person talking in your native language, in a dialect reasonably close to your own, it sometimes still takes a few seconds for you to adjust to their accent? This doesn’t happen for me in Chinese. I’ve met a few friends’ parents recently, one from Shanxi (or was it Shaanxi?), the other from Heilongjiang. I did ok with a Heilongjiang accent, but although I’m pretty sure the one from Shanxi was speaking Mandarin to me, my mind just couldn’t make the correspondences between the sounds I’ve learned and the things he said.

This one, I think, is relatively easy to fix if I felt the need to do it. There’s a growing body of research that says that exposure to a variety of people is necessary when learning to process the sounds of a new language–at least if you want to be able to generalize to new instances of the sound. And I imagine that if you want to be able to understand regional variations, that number increases. I would hazard a guess that language classrooms would actually be more effective if they exposed people to more non-standard language.

The second situation: a noisy party. Did you ever think about how much of your native language your brain can fill in for you? If ambient noise keeps you from hearing 50% of what someone says, you’re still not doomed to conversational failure. (Please note: 50% is an arbitrary number, not my professional opinion. I’m sure there is research about this but I’m not familiar with it.) In English I hear “A__ __u plan____ __ se__ y___ da_____er to kindergarten?” Given the context that we’re talking about my daughter, my brain easily fills in the missing bits and I tell them “Yes, we’re looking at schools now.” I might not even notice that I missed half the sentence. But run the equivalent by me in Chinese, and I’m doomed. I’m starting to get more used to the rampant elision in the local dialect, but when it’s arbitrarily caused by noise, my brain just gives up, and I become increasingly more embarrassed as someone translates for me questions that I should have easily understood (especially given that the patient asker had already repeated the question three times).

I don’t know how to fix this one. Possibly, the willingness to be constantly embarrassed, or better yet, to not be embarrassable, is the best language learning skill that there is.

Back in the saddle again

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Er, wait. Wrong metaphor. Anyway, after inadvertently taking a four-month break from my language lessons, I have started studying again, which means, I hope, that I’ll be updating this blog more frequently too.

In the meantime, there’s a nice post over at Sinoglot which finally gives me a mental space on which to hang the idea that “up” is associated with past time and “down” with future time in Chinese.

Update: post is now linked here

You can take the children out of Shanghai but you can't take Shanghai out of the children

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I was listening to two siblings talk the other day and was surprised to hear them pronounce the word play, 玩, as ‘wan’ instead of ‘war’. (For standard pinyin sticklers, that would be ‘wanr’.) This is an instant dead giveaway that they must be southerners. No northerner I’ve encountered, not even my Chinese teacher who insists that I pronounce 这个 as ‘zhe ge’ and not ‘zhei ge’, says ‘wan’. The surprising thing, to me, was this: they’re 6 and … 10? They’ve lived in the north for over a year, and before that they lived in the US for over a year. (Before that, I think, Shanghai, though I’m not sure for how long.) I would have expected that a year was plenty enough time for a young child to adapt to a local accent. But apparently I would have been wrong. I wonder if on the playground they’d use ‘war’?