From robin@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx Fri Feb 12 03:34:33 1999 X-Digest-Num: 59 Message-ID: <44114.59.227.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 13:34:33 +0200 From: Robin Turner Robin Turner wrote: > > la .ivan cusku di'e > > > Oh, there is no shortage of languages with a single /l / r/ > > > phoneme [...]. Apart from Mandarin, [...] > > > > For once I think I've caught Ivan out! > > Fie, fie, Robin! Caught me out? You should not even dream > of doing such a thing. > > > Although Mandarin doesn't have exactly the same /l/r/ sounds > > as English, there's still a distinction e.g. "ren", "li". > > Yes, Mandarin does have an initial that is written as _r_ > in pinyin (and as _j_ in some other romanisation systems, > and as Cyrillic _zh_ in Palladius' system). The romanisation as "j" always used to confuse me; even more so the explanation given in some books that it is like English "wren", which I pronounce like any other English /r/-initial. > Its most common > realisation is, from what I've heard and read, /z./ (voiced > retroflex fricative). Can one say that it is a/the Mandarin > /r/ phoneme? Of course, since notations for phonemes are > merely convenient labels. Does it follow that a Mandarin > speaker would/should pronounce Lojban {r} as Mandarin _r_? > By no means. I beg to differ. It probably depends on the particular Mandarin speakers we've been exposed to. I learnt (or more accurately, struggled valiantly with) Chinese with a North Chinese teacher, whose "r"s were very pronounced, both initial ("ren") and final ("er", and even "fengr"). I'd say the Beijing /r/ is still closer to Lojban {r} than {j} (especially if you accept that Lojban {r} has a fairly wide range of acceptable pronunciation). > It would be a natural choice if the closest > Mandarin thing to Lojban {r} were _r_ and if the closest > Lojban thing to Mandarin _r_ were {r}; but in fact the various > European _r_ sounds are universally rendered as _l_ in Chinese > (`Robin' _Luo2bin1_, `Rousseau' _Lu2suo1_, `Ruhr' _Lu3er3_, > `Rome' _Luo2ma3_), and if I heard the _r_ of _ren2_ in Lojban > speech, I reckon I would interpret it as {j} rather than {r}. > An interesting point, though remember that a major factor in Sinification is the availability of morphemes and the suitability of their literal meaning, e.g. Baiqiuen for Bethune. Chinese aren't too fussy at producing a version which is very phonetically close to the original; the important thing is how it comes over in Chinese. I used to jokingly refer to myself as "Riben" in class, which is dead unaccaptable, since it means "Japanese" (in our textbook only seen together with "guize" - "devil"). > > (There is the `other' _r_, the one in _er_, which has nothing > to do with the initial except that it happens to be written > with the same letter in pinyin; but that doesn't have the > distribution of a consonant, so I'm disregarding it here.) I wouldn't say it has _nothing_ to do with the initial. As far as I remember from all those pronunciation drills we had to do, the tongue is just rather more curled back in the final "r". More practically, having taught English to a large number of Japanese and a smaller number of Chinese, I can say that almost all Japanese students have a /r/l/ problem, but of the Chinese, only Cantonese speakers seem to experience this (as in the notorious "flie lice" example, and any Cantonese who works in a take-away gets over that pretty quickly!). co'o mi'e robin.