Re: Accent

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

la .ivan cusku di'e

> 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.