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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Mandarin dialects [was: Re: Pinyin
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References: <E3Gwqw.1pG@midway.uchicago.edu> <19970105021100.VAA07293@ladder01.news.aol.com>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 19:26:53 GMT
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In article <19970105021100.VAA07293@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
Feiscreen <feiscreen@aol.com> wrote:
>deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) writes:
>>So, according to you, "Taiwanese Mandarin" and "Beijing Mandarin"
>>are either misnomers (which few would argue, given how much frequency
>>these terms have) or they are identical (which even fewer would argue).
>>Not even all natives of Beijing speak the same "dialect"--and what most
>of
>>them speak certainly isn't what you'll hear broadcast by Xinhua.
>
>  I agree with the above.  Interestingly though, the News Readers on TV
>  in Taiwan and on mainland speak the same "Mandarin dialect". I could
>  only tell which is which by paying attention to the contents of the
>  news.
[snip]
>  There must be a standard training procedure that make the CCTV
>  and Taiwan TV news readers speak that artificial dialect.

	I really wish they wouldn't!  One of the nicest things about
Taiwanese Mandarin is that it dispenses with the retroflex quality of many
sounds (i.e. Pinyin r, sh, ch, zh).  I find this the single most
unattractive feature of Beijing Mandarin.
>
>>Will the true "Mandarin dialect" please stand up?
>
>  I often find that a well-educated person from  Mandarin speaking areas
>  other than Beijing speak the "true" Mandarin dialect much better than
>  an average Beijingren who grows up in one of those Hu2Tongr4s.

	I'm not at all surprised.  You could say the same thing about
English and French, for instance.  Many Londoners and Parisians are
incomprehensible to foreigners who learned the "London Standard" or
"Parisian Standard" of pronunciation.

>  Tai4 van3 le, ge1menr4 bu4 ding1 le. Mingr2 zai4 jie1zhe kan3.
> ( too late, I can't last any longer, continue to talk tomorrow.
>  -- and Beijingren sometimes use  "V" in place of "W" because
>  "V" requires less effort to pronounce, and it does not cause
>  confusions either, because there is officially no "V" sound in
>  Mandarin).

	As someone who pronounces both [v] and [w] regularly, I can't see
how one requires any more or less effort than the other.  This sounds like
a completely unmotivated sound change of the type which happens all the
time.  In Vulgar Latin, for example.  (The Classical pronunciation of
VINUS was ['wi:nus], for example.)  It also took place in Wu2
(Shanghainese) at some point.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
