Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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> As you can see, there is no 'v'.

V also doesn't occur in any pinyin finals, but Chinese people commonly use it in their own pinyin spelling anyway because it is used in pinyin input methods as a substitute for ü, which is harder to type.

Your list of initials left out the zero initial, which is important for words like 饿 or 安. As I've commented elsewhere, though "y" is a pinyin initial, "yue" does not feature it - "yue" is just the spelling of the final -üe when no initial is present.

This leads into a question I've had for a while - I know that some Chinese people do not distinguish between y- initials and r- initials. I'd like to know whether that lack of distinction somehow extends to every pinyin syllable that might be spelled with a "y", even if the "y" is normally not viewed as being part of an initial, as in "yu" / "yin" / "yue". Do you know the answer?

(I know that the lack of distinction occurs for 人 even though it does not rhyme with any syllable that might theoretically begin with y- in Mandarin. But that's not quite the same as what I'm asking about; 人 is definitely not a syllable with a zero initial. I would be interested in how the lack of distinction plays out for a syllable like "ri", where it's not obvious to me how the vowel would accommodate changing the initial to y-.)

In Cantonese pronunciation ru often becomes jyu (in Jyutping), ri becomes jat, similarly for rang, rong, ran. I guess this same shift is likely reflected in mandarin pronunciations in some areas. This suggests that this is a general change.

I think the relevant wikipedia article might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology, which should reflect the shift from the earlier Cantonese-like pronunciation (yu style) to modern Mandarin-like (ru style), but it's a bit beyond me. Maybe this "The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme /ɻ/." is relevant?

More discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/orf800/questio... and at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?16,126118 which suggests "If a word is pronounced "y-" in Cantonese but "r-" in Mandarin, it's reconstructed as "gn", after Hokkien".

I didn't mean to ask about how the same character is read in different varieties of Chinese. I meant to ask about how different people pronounce Mandarin.

For example, here's a video of a popular karaoke streamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTJIthWk_KA . She is singing in Mandarin.

But she seems to have some trouble distinguishing r- from y-. To my nonnative ear, when she sings renbuzhu the r- is fairly clear, but her rang uses more of an intermediate sound, and in one case the palatalization is so heavy that I just hear yang.

On the other hand, where the Mandarin calls for y-, I don't notice that she inserts an r- quality.

This is the phenomenon that I'd like to know more about.

More generally, I'm interested in how some pinyin spelling choices that do not seem intuitive from the outside were made. Consider yi / sun / diu / yan. Anyone who approaches these syllables assuming that the letters in their spelling should have the same values that they do in other pinyin syllables is going to get a shock. ("Shouldn't yan rhyme with tan?") But the spellings must have made sense to the committee that fixed them... right?

When people pronounce mandarin they often pronounce differently depending on their local dialects, which is why I brought up Cantonese/hokkien. In turn these often derive from older variants of chinese. It seems like there has been some kind of shift from ngxxx in Middle Chinese to yxxx in Cantonese and to rxxx in mandarin, but only for some vowel sounds now represented by y… in mandarin, which is why we don’t see the y to r shift for other vowels. Just guessing here, definitely not an expert.

The pinyin spellings are confusing, and I’m not sure the history of why they were chosen exactly like that. It definitely makes it hard to learn the pronunciations.

> It seems like there has been some kind of shift from ngxxx in Middle Chinese to yxxx in Cantonese and to rxxx in mandarin, but only for some vowel sounds now represented by y… in mandarin, which is why we don’t see the y to r shift for other vowels.

I think this is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon. Historical sound changes that occurred between Middle Chinese and the present can explain why the same word is pronounced differently in different varieties of Chinese.

But they can't explain why or how certain people perceive different sounds to be equivalent. Consider a non-Chinese example - the letter Y in the English words yard and day derives from an original G. (There was also a G at the end of the word I, and it changed in the same way, but this is not reflected by a letter Y in the modern spelling of I.)

But the historical sound change does not mean that modern English speakers have trouble telling the difference between the sound of a Y and the sound of a G. They don't. All modern speakers will effortlessly maintain the distinction between yard and guard or gird, and between yes and guess, just like they maintain the distinctions between big and bee or bag and bay. If you suggested to them that any such pair of words might sound similar to each other, they'd give you funny looks.

I'm interested in the ability of speakers to produce and perceive differences between different sounds, not in the different evolution of one sound as it develops along different historical paths. (Well, not here. I am interested in the historical development of the sound as a more general matter, but it's not what I was asking about.)

I was hoping that a fuller understanding of the identification of r- and y- in certain Chinese regions might help explain why certain pinyin syllables are spelled with an initial letter Y. For example, I have been saying that "yue" represents the combination of a final -üe with a zero initial, and this is indeed the official definition, but there's a bit more to it than that - I knew a Cantonese girl for whom the Mandarin words 肉 and 月 began with the same sound. That's easy to explain if "yue" really does have an initial y-; it's much harder to explain if "yue" has no initial consonant.

月 and 肉 initials are much closer in Cantonese which is why Cantonese speakers often fail to differentiate these sounds in mandarin. I don’t think it’s directly linked to the pinyin, which has a different evolutionary path.

You see the same in Nanjing dialect, where speakers fail to differentiate l/n initials and n/ng finals. The pinyin is different, but their home dialect doesn’t distinguish so they fail to distinguish the sounds. Presumably if Nanjing speakers had been writing the pinyin standards there would be more chance that lan/rang would have ended up written the same.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_dialect

I think what you’re after probably is a historical analysis of romanisations including pinyin. Such an analysis might also cover other no-obvious features of pinyin, like why jiao and yao have similar vowel sounds but different spellings and the nv/yu and nu/wu similarities and differences.

For your historical English example, I think in some dialects and in some historical times there would have been people that fail to distinguish some of your examples and others but all of this is a bit beyond my expertise.

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