Basic Minnan/Teochew Grammar

[Ah-bin]

Ah yes, but which sort of Mandarin?

My first professor of Chinese has been doing research into tones in Taiwanese Mandarin, and noted that tone one was usually 44, tone two a dipping tone like 323, tone three a low falling tone like 21, and tone four had become higher to distinguish it from tone three, making 54 instead of 53 (the numbers are my own based on the observations of his charts). I can confirm that my second and third tones are just as he described them, because people in China often mistook me for saying "far" (yuan3) when I was actually saying "round" (yuan2). I don't recall ever having the same trouble in Taiwan.

It made me wonder whether the same thing hasn't happened in Malaysian and Singaporean Mandarin, both of which have been heavily influenced by Hokkien.

I think he published the research here:

Sanders, R.M., "Citation Tone Change in Taiwan Mandarin: Should Teachers Remain Tone Deaf?", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Volume 43, No 2, pp 1-16, 2008.

I think by "remain tone deaf" he means that they keep on teaching things that don't exist in speech any more because they are promulgated as standard.

[SimL]

Ah yes, but which sort of Mandarin?

Yes, very good point.

When I said what I did, I was indeed just thinking of the simplistic model, as shown in all beginners' textbooks on "Mandarin": 55, 35, 214, 51. If I understand correctly, "standard Mandarin" of the PRC is supposed to be the speech of an (idealized) "educated native of Beijing", but perhaps hardly anyone uses these exact contours. As this standard was set in the middle of the previous century, even the contours of an educated native of Beijing might have changed slightly since then. I also wonder, when they set the "standard", whether they had similar tools to "Praat", which could display tone contours in an objective way, or whether it was based on the intuition of (to be sure) very gifted linguists.

[AndrewAndrew]

Ah yes, but which sort of Mandarin?

My first professor of Chinese has been doing research into tones in Taiwanese Mandarin, and noted that tone one was usually 44, tone two a dipping tone like 323, tone three a low falling tone like 21, and tone four had become higher to distinguish it from tone three, making 54 instead of 53 (the numbers are my own based on the observations of his charts). I can confirm that my second and third tones are just as he described them, because people in China often mistook me for saying "far" (yuan3) when I was actually saying "round" (yuan2). I don't recall ever having the same trouble in Taiwan.

It made me wonder whether the same thing hasn't happened in Malaysian and Singaporean Mandarin, both of which have been heavily influenced by Hokkien.

It most definitely has - most Malaysians pronounce tone 3 as a low falling tone, and do not have the rise at the end. Conversely, when I first went to Beijing, I couldn't distinguish tone 3 fully pronounced (e.g. in isolation or at the end of a phrase) from tone 2. The high tone 4 is probably from Hokkien.

[AndrewAndrew]

Ok, very interesting. Well, hopefully, when it is released as a dissertation, you can post a link to it here, and perhaps discuss it in more detail at that time.

It's actually the full version of the abstract Ah-Bin posted here (http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/jakarta/seals ... /sarah.pdf), but the fact remains that it was forwarded to me by someone who has been in contact with the author, and I don't know if either of us has permission to distribute it.