Now, the pinyin pronunciation for #1 is “yòng”, and for the first syllable of #2 is “yùn”, implying there is a difference in sound between “yò” and “yù”. And, if we listen to the words as spoken by using Google Translate, the “yò” sound in #1 does sound slightly different than the “yù” sound in #2.
However, the bopomofo is:
用 ㄩㄥˋ
運送 ㄩㄣˋㄙㄨㄥˋ
So “yòng” is written in bopomofo as ㄩㄥˋ, and the “yùn” is written in bopomofo as ㄩㄣˋ.
This therefore means that ㄩ is pronounced as “yò” when part of ㄩㄥˋ, but ㄩ is pronounced as “yù” when part of ㄩㄣˋ.
Isn’t that inconsistent?
It seems to imply that the sound of ㄩ depends on the following sound, changing based on whether the following sound is ㄥ or ㄣ. But I’m not aware of any other words where the previous sound is affected by the choice of ㄥ or ㄣ as the following sound.
It’s more a limitation of pinyin than bo po mo fo.
There’s a few similar sounding ones (but are in fact not the same) where pinyin just groups together. This is one reason why I hate typing in Chinese. I don’t know how people type a bunch of words a minute, but it takes me forever to compose a sentence in Chinese because it’s entering all the bo po mo fo, assuming I didn’t mess up and run into one of those similar sounding letters (like 摻 and 餐), because if I do and I wonder why my chosen character isn’t there, I would have to start the process all over.
Following your logic, ㄩ+ㄥ would be equivalent to “y”+“òng”, where the sound of ㄩis roughly similar to the “yù” sound in “yùn”, they are roughly the same sound.
But if you look at it in terms of IPA, and when you hear people talk, they are a bit different:
用 /jʊŋ/
運 /yn/
But I’ve heard people pronounce 用 as /yʊŋ/ when strongly emphasizing as well.
I used to wonder why 用 is written as ㄩㄥˋ and not as ㄩㄨㄥˋ, since we have 紅 as ㄏㄨㄥˊ. I guess it’s as you said, the preceeding sound affects pronunciation (even ㄨ changes as in ㄏㄨㄥˊ vs. ㄨㄥ).
ㄢ is pronounced differently in 韓 ㄏㄢˊ vs. 言 ㄧㄢˊ I guess for the same reason, the preceding sound. At least the difference seems to be consistent, which is a heck of a lot better than crazy English spelling.
So I guess the best way to think about this is that the pronunciation of the spoken language itself is inconsistent, so neither bopomofo nor pinyin can be perfectly consistent and systematic. But it does seem that pinyin makes more explicit some of the changes in pronunciation.
Right; that’s one difference that I’ve more or less internalized because I’ve seen it so often.
That is the same in Pinyin though, Hán and Yán. Even in Taigi lomaji, /an/ and /iɛn/ are written as an and ian. There are two factors. First, they just didn’t bother to make a character for ɛ in iɛn. Second, the iɛn pronunciation in both Mandarin and Taigi are very recent developments. In some accents, the original ian pronunciation are both preserved in Mandarin and Taigi.
As for ㄩㄥˋ, I also feel like the /jʊŋ/ reading is a fairly recent development. At least for 勇, I feel like people used to say it as /yüŋ/, or they at least rounded their lips before saying the word. I’ve only started hearing the /jʊŋ/ pronunciation for 勇 after stupid Chinese dramas began flooding the market.
The Zhuyin system is designed to have initials, medials and finals. ㄩ is designed to just be the medial, so ㄩ in ㄩㄥˋ isn’t the initial, the initial is just empty. If it’s Korean it’d be written as ㄥㄩㄥˋ. That is why you just can’t have ㄩㄨㄥˋ in the system.
Would ㄧㄨㄥˋ then be possible? I know that ㄧ and ㄩ are different sounds, but I wonder how a native speaker would pronounce ㄧㄨㄥˋ if they saw it. What about ㄧㄡㄥˋ?
If you work backwards from your theory, you may start to wonder how the hell taiwanse can’t do the English L despite having the sound in their alphabet.
There are exceptions. Everyhere. If you don’t look Han a like, no matter how good your mandarin may be, the Han grandma that can’t pronounce say, F, and says H instead will always be better in ones eyes. Just as we often eat (or at least order) with our eyes, so do we judge language be at peace. To learn one language here means leaning accents, educations, preferences etc. Much like west coast Canadians vs Newfies. New York vs Appalachia vs PNW. People from Scotland, Wales, Ireland vs North America speaking English. Etc. Try to put a Welsh guy, a Seattle guy and a newfie into a phonics class. That would be great fun!
ㄧ ㄨ ㄩ are all medials. Hence being arranged vertically in the same column. So no, if I had to guess, but Hansioux is way more knowledgeable than myself.
Keyboard is arranged with initials on the left, medials in-between, and finals on the right. Also generally arranged phonetically at least for the initials, ㄅㄆㄇㄈ being labials, ㄉㄊㄋㄌ dentals, ㄍㄎㄏ gluttoral, etc. idea being you take a initial, a medial, and a final, at most.
They are possible to say, but those diphthongs are not compatible with the Zhuyin system.
A lot of these new io replacing ü trends are in fact defaulting back to earlier pronunciations. For example, 用 is said to sound the same as 容 maybe just with a different tone.
用【唐韻】【集韻】【韻會】【正韻】余頌切，容去聲。
In post-war era Mandarin, they don’t even rhyme. The new yong pronunciation, now is much like Taigi’s iōng, which is just one tone away from 容 (iông).
be at peace. To learn one language here means leaning accents, educations, preferences etc. Much like west coast Canadians vs Newfies. New York vs Appalachia vs PNW. People from Scotland, Wales, Ireland vs North America speaking English. Etc. Try to put a Welsh guy, a Seattle guy and a newfie into a phonics class. That would be great fun!