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".