Reading Chinese Menus: Concepts: The multiple uses of "i"

[kake]

Last Monday I wrote about tone sandhi, the tone changes that may occur when two syllables come together. Another notable aspect of pronunciation is related to the vowel "i". The "normal" way to pronounce this vowel is as the "ee" in e.g. "bee".

However, "i" is also used to stand for what my textbook tells me is called "the blade-palatal vowel [ʅ]" after the initials "ch", "r", "sh", and "zh", and "the blade-alveolar vowel [ɿ]" after the initials "c", "s", and "z". (According to Wikipedia, the "ee" sound I describe in the previous paragraph is a "close front unrounded vowel".)

This takes us into the realm of phonetics, a subject which fascinates and baffles me in equal measures. Although I have spent hours on the internet trying to find some good examples of people pronouncing the various "i"s mentioned above, somehow I always end up going around in circles.

My textbook says: In pronouncing such symbols as "zhi" and "chi", the tongue is kept still, and care must be taken not to pronounce it as the simple final "i[i]" which is never found after "zh, ch, sh" or "r". (It is silent on the matter of pronouncing e.g. "si".) Wikipedia says: -i is a buzzed continuation of the consonant following z-, c-, s-, zh-, ch-, sh- or r-. In the last resort, as a very rough guide, I suppose I'd say that using an "uh" sound for it instead of an "ee" sound would be an improvement.

As I said in my introductory post, I don't actually speak Mandarin, so I don't plan to go much further into its details than this. However, the double third tone sandhi and the different pronunciations of "i" confused me for ages, so I thought it was worth mentioning them.

(Note added later: In comments, pne points out a couple of slightly more subtle pronunciation variations regarding "e" and "u".)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See here for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[pne]

Similarly, as I understand it, "e" is pronounced differently in "e ge ke le ne" on the one hand and in "ye" on the other (sometimes spelled "ê" in the second case) - it's more of an "uh" in the first set and an "eh" in the second.

And "u" is pronounced differently in "yu ju qu xu" (like French "u") compared to "wu zhu chu shu" (like French "ou") - this is mostly an orthographic convention: since the /u/ sound can't appear after j- q- x-, they can get away with dropping the dots on "ü", whereas since both /u/ and /y/ can occur after /l n/, there you have to spell "nü, lü" explicitly to contrast them with "nu, lu".

[kake]

Ooh, I didn't know about the "e" thing, thanks. Which of those would you say the "e" sound at the 2:45 mark in this video is?

I knew about the "u" thing but had forgotten it needed mentioning! Mainly, I think, because 魚/yú was one of the first characters I learned, so I've internalised its pronunciation, and I don't think I have anything in my vocabulary yet that uses the pinyin ju, qu, or xu, so in my brain it's just how you pronounce "yu", and doesn't need thinking about. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I should probably edit a mention into the post, and have now done so :) I actually have a video on the pronunciation of "ü" in my bookmarks list, which I think demonstrates it pretty well.

[pne]

Ooh, I didn't know about the "e" thing, thanks. Which of those would you say the "e" sound at the 2:45 mark in this video is?

The "uh" one. Compare it with the sound at 3:45, where she says "ie" (which is spelled "ye" as a syllable on its own, but "ie" if a consonant precedes: qie jie xie) -- that one is ê, the "eh" sound.

You'll also notice that several of the names of the consonants end in -e (with the "uh") pronunciation: de te ne le ge ke he.

(The bilabials and labiodentals have -uo, though, which is spelled -o in those cases: bo po mo fo; j q x have -i, and zh ch sh r z c s have the weird retroflex vowel that's also spelled -i in pinyin.)

[kake]

"ie" (which is spelled "ye" as a syllable on its own, but "ie" if a consonant precedes: qie jie xie) -- that one is ê, the "eh" sound.

Ah-ha! I understand what you mean now. I hadn't been thinking of "ie" as a variant on "e" but as a completely separate vowel.

[pne]

On re-reading, perhaps I was a bit confused: with ê, I meant not "ie" as a whole, but the second part of that diphthong.

Ê by itself, I think, occurs only as an interjection (where you often have - across all languages - sounds that don't otherwise occur in words; compare the "tsk tsk" sound in English, which doesn't otherwise have clicks), so it's pretty marginal as a phoneme.

As a sound, it really only occurs (I think) as the second part of the "ie" (ye) diphthong and as the second part of the "üe" (yue) diphthong (xue, yue, etc.).

Compare "zhe" with "jie/jue", "che" with "qie/que", "she" with "xie/xue"; not only the consonant is different, but also the quality of the final "e" (monophthong "uh" vs. diphthong ending in "eh").

[kake]

OK, got it, I think :)

Ê by itself, I think, occurs only as an interjection (where you often have - across all languages - sounds that don't otherwise occur in words; compare the "tsk tsk" sound in English, which doesn't otherwise have clicks), so it's pretty marginal as a phoneme.

This is totally off-topic now, but I'm now wondering how these interjections are written in Chinese... for example, if you're doing a verbatim transcription of speech in English, you might have something like: "So then she did this, um, thing." "Tsk tsk, what was she thinking?" — is there a Chinese character for "um"? Or "tsk"? How are newly-minted sounds written, for example if I was trying to transcribe someone howling in a particular way? Like in English, I might write something like "aaaaaaooooooooohhhh".

[pne]

Good question, though now I'm really out of my depth.

I know that some interjections and other particles have characters, very often with the "mouth" radical (e.g. 哈哈 "hā hā" = sound of laughing; 嘿 "hēi" = hey!).

How a Chinese would transcribe random growls or howls I have no idea.

As for "um" and "tut-tut/tsk tsk", I can imagine that there are conventional characters for those, but I have no idea what they might be.

[kake]

I just remembered that I had a related conversation with shuripentu a while back, and she pointed me at 嗯, which I guess is a sort of a grunt — mouth radical again there, as you note.