I told you, it’s for YOUR CONVENIENCE. Now go memorize all those “exceptions”. 
(The other possible answer, if you insist on another one, would be “complex historical reasons.” 
)
Ji4suanji is also 'computer in Taiwan. The National Computing Center, for example, uses this outdated but accurate term.
[quote=“pikafumanchu”][quote=“archangel-x”]I’ve found another one.
computer:
Taiwanese Chinese: 電腦 (dian4 nao3)
Chinese Chinese: 計算機 (ji4 suan4 ji1) - which in Taiwan would be a calculator…[/quote]
When I was studying in Beijing, the computers were referred to as 電腦. I have heard 計算機, but I cant remember if it was meant as computer or calculator. Either way, the teachers and everyone used 電腦 for computer.
Isn’t there a different word for peanut? I know I learned it but I can’t remember.[/quote]
[quote]they don’t call New York 新約 (xin1 yue1)
so why do they have to call New Zealand 新西蘭 (xin1 xi1 lan2) [/quote]
Ah, whether to go with assigning a Chinese character by meaning 新 or by sound 紐? My favorite place name in Chinese is the one for Oxford 牛津, which goes by meaning for seemingly no particular reason (maybe an archaic translation?)
Actually I had arguments with my mainland ex-girlfriend on several words. I would then look them up on my Taiwan dictionary and lo-and-behold, she would be right.
Examples:
帆 - sail - I insisited it was fan2, and she was right – it’s supposed to be fan1
企 - I insisited it was qi4, as in qi4ye4 (企業), but she was right, it’s supposed to be qi3.
What I most noticed is the “er-hua” pronunciation in the Beijing-Hubei area. Words like “fandiar” instead of “fandian”. But not everyone is equally heavy on the “er” - I almost wonder if it’s a social class kind of thing.
In Taiwan, I hear a definite tendency for “sh” to become just “s” - “si bu si” instead of “shi bu shi”.
The word for cliff - in mainland it’s “duanya” but in Taiwan “duanyai”. That’s seems to be unique - no other character in Chinese is pronounced “yai”, and it’s only that way in Taiwan.
[quote=“robert_storey”]
The word for cliff - in mainland it’s “duanya” but in Taiwan “duanyai”. That’s seems to be unique - no other character in Chinese is pronounced “yai”, and it’s only that way in Taiwan.[/quote]
According to the dictionary there are several “yai2’s,” such as 崖,睚,啀,娾,崕,and 嘊
[quote=“BAH”][quote=“robert_storey”]
The word for cliff - in mainland it’s “duanya” but in Taiwan “duanyai”. That’s seems to be unique - no other character in Chinese is pronounced “yai”, and it’s only that way in Taiwan.[/quote]
According to the dictionary there are several “yai2’s,” such as ?,?,?,?,?,and ?[/quote]
My mainland Chinese dictionary doesn’t show any “yai’s” at all. My made-in-Taiwan “Far East Chinese-English Concise Dictionary” only has one (it lists 7331 characters total). But I’m not saying you’re wrong - perhaps I’m the victim of a crappy dictionary. What dictionary are you using?
Actually I just checked using the Microsoft IME, and typed in yai2.
[quote=“BAH”]Actually I had arguments with my mainland ex-girlfriend on several words. I would then look them up on my Taiwan dictionary and lo-and-behold, she would be right.
Examples:
帆 - sail - I insisited it was fan2, and she was right – it’s supposed to be fan1
企 - I insisited it was qi4, as in qi4ye4 (企業), but she was right, it’s supposed to be qi3.[/quote]
Huh? What Taiwanese dictionary are you looking at? Every one that I own shows 企 as qi4 and 帆 as fan2. These are the original pronunciations for these words as decided by the ROC language police and linguistics sholars back in the 1930s. The PRC continued to follow these for a while, but changed their dictionaries to reflect the changes that were occurring in spoken Chinese. If you look in a PRC dictionary from the 1950s, I guarantee that you will find 企業 as qi4ye4 and 帆 as fan2. Here are some other common examples:
時期shi2qi2 (ROC)/shi2qi1 (PRC)
古跡gu3ji1/gu3ji4
寂寞ji2mo4/ji4mo4
輕微qing1wei2/qing1wei1
研究yan2jiu4/yan2jiu1
Both you and your ex are correct. According to the folks who run the PRC’s Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi, pronunciations that follow PRC or ROC dictionaries are to be considered as equally correct. Are you sure you were looking at a Taiwan dictionary? Who published it? Taiwan’s lexicographers are extremely conservative about adopting any changes that have happened on the mainland since 1949, and they’re even more conservative about changing anything to reflect the way Guoyu is actually spoken by most Taiwanese people.
Hmm… I’m looking at Lanbridge’s Concise Chinese-English Dictionary, 文橋出版社, published in Taipei, Taiwan in 1981, revised edition in 1985.
According to this dictionary, 微 is first tone. I swore to my ex that it’s 2nd, but I looked it up in my Taiwan dictionary, and there it is, in the first tone. (According to zhongwen.com, though, it could be either 1st or 2nd tone).
I’m not far enough along in Chinese to pick up on too many vocabulary differences. I mainly hear dfferences between Taiwanese pronunciation and the mainland pronunciation on my tapes. Or at least I think I hear them, and that’s kinda why I posted, to find out if I’m just hearing things. Anyway, here’s some of what I think I hear:
For consonants:
Shi, whatever the tone, is pronounced si. For example, wo3 shi4 is pronounced wo3 si4, and lao3shi1 is pronounced lao3si1. And more generally, I don’t think most Taiwanese have the sh sound. For example, I’ve heard shou1yin1ji1 pronounced sou1yin1ji1. Or ta1 shuo1sounds like ta1 suo1. I think they also say su1 instead of shu1.
Once I overheard one of the older students making a tape for the kids to practice for a contest. She came to the English phrase “bamboo shoot,” and she pronounced it “bamboo soot,” where the oo is the one in boot, not in foot. Her s seemed as if maybe the tongue was closer to where the teeth join than the English s is, maybe like s represented by pinyin x.
Zh is usually pronounced z, and ch is usually pronounced c. So Zhong1guo2 is pronounced Zong1guo2, and chi1 fan4 is ci1 fan4. And to me, zhei4ge sounds something like ze4ge.
For vowels:
Anecdote: Once I was trying to teach some kindergarten kids the long a in English because they only seemed to be able to say the short a. So I tried to approximate the long a of English.
I said, “When someone calls on the telephone, you say what? You say, ‘Wei2.’ Okay, say it. Say, ‘Wei2’” (Note: I guess this is supposed to be wei4, but it sounds like wei2 when people say it answering the phone.) They came back with something that I think would be rendered this way in IPA: "[b]W
The “f” sound also often gets pronounced as an “h.” Like “chi fan” (to eat) becomes “chi huan”, or “Fujian” (a province in China) becomes “hu jian.”
As for vocabulary, there are quite a few differences, but if you haven’t studied or lived in the mainland, you probably wouldn’t notice it. There have been whole books written on vocabulary differences between the mainland and Taiwan. Some pretty minor (they still understand each other), while others are pretty major. For example, ask a Taiwanese what “xi1 hong2 shi4” is, and most will have no idea that it’s a tomato. However, although Taiwanese mainly use jiao3 ta4 che1 for “bicycle,” they will also understand the mainland term zi4 xing2 che1.
Or, “ci huan”, since retroflex sounds (sh, ch, zh, r) lose their retroflexivity.
[quote=“LittleBuddhaTW”]or “Fujian” (a province in China) becomes “hu jian.”
[/quote]
And with really strong Taiwanese accents, the “jian” in “fujian” loses its y-glide, so it sounds like “jEn” (where “E” represents the short E sound in the English word “bet”).
In addition, the final “-eng” sound, as in “sheng”, sounds like “-en”. So, “Fujian sheng” would sound like “hu jEn sen”.
Other features of a moderately strong Taiwanese accent: “ri” sounds like English /z/, so Japan is “z-ben”.
Many Taiwanese people who can pronounce their retroflex sounds often overcorrect in their speech, especially when enunciating (which can be a problem when they are teaching a foreigner how to pronounce words correctly!) So “gongsi” (company) becomes “gongshi”, and “bucuo” (not bad) becomes “buchuo”.
[quote=“LittleBuddhaTW”]The “f” sound also often gets pronounced as an “h.”[/quote] Thanks, I never noticed that. I’ll be listening for it.
[quote=“Chris”][R]etroflex sounds (sh, ch, zh, r) lose their retroflexivity.[/quote] Thanks, that’s what I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. On the other hand, it sounds to me as if some Taiwanese seem to use an initial r sound similar to the mainland r.
[quote=“LittleBuddhaTW”]or “Fujian” (a province in China) becomes “hu jian.”[/quote] Thanks, I didn’t catch that one. I’ll be listening for it.
Thanks very much, I’ll be listening for that one, too.
[quote=“Chris”]In addition, the final “-eng” sound, as in “sheng”, sounds like “-en”. So, “Fujian sheng” would sound like “hu jEn sen”.[/quote] When I first got here, I tried out some expression or other on one of the Chinese teachers. I tried to mimic the pronunciation from my tapes. One of the words I used had an ng ending (maybe the word was ming2, I forget). The teacher repeated the expression but used n insted of ng for the word in question. This teacher was ethnically Chinese but a Burmese national, so I chalked it up to that for a while. Then I heard it elsewhere, the use of n instead of ng.
[quote=“Chris”]Other features of a moderately strong Taiwanese accent: “ri” sounds like English /z/, so Japan is “z-ben”.[/quote] Thanks, I’ll be listening.
[quote=“Chris”]Many Taiwanese people who can pronounce their retroflex sounds often overcorrect in their speech. . . . [/quote] Yeah, many of them are conscious of the lack of a retroflex sound. In fact, when I had finally gotten to the point where I was regularly saying si4 instead of shi4, a Taiwanese corrected me, saying, “You mean shi4.” :s
I also think I’ve noticed either overcorrection or an entirely different pronunciation scheme about when to use n and when to use ng. For example, on my old school contract, Toufen is rendered Toue Feng. Setting aside the Toue, someone decided to use ng in the spelling. I thought maybe that was just a typo or something, but since then I think I’ve heard Taiwanese using ng where only n is required in standard Mandarin pronunciation. I wonder if this is hypercorrection or simply that the Taiwanese (or some of them) have another pronunciation paradigm.
To try to put it all in perspective: I once talked to a Mormon whose Chinese seemed very good, and while he acknowledged that there were mainland/Taiwan pronunciation differences, he didn’t make much of them. He acted as if he didn’t give it a lot of thought and just went ahead and used mostly mainland pronunciation. And he seemed to be getting along just fine that way.
As a final note, one Sunday I stumbled on a radio station that must have been located here in Taiwan (my radio is rinky-dink), and whoever was talking was liberally sprinkling his speech with the [e]r that the mainland folks like so much, as in yi4dianr3. He sounded like the people on my tapes. Does anyone know what sort of program this might be (I didn’t understand enough of it to figure out what was going on)?
Anyway, thanks for your help.
xp+10K
Sorry, accidental double post.
Little Buddha, can you recommend any of those books listing vocab differences? I don’t know any, and I’d like to get one. I’m now doing medical interpreting in the US, and I’m coming up against a fair number of these differences.
Here are some more I know:
出租車 計程車 taxi
軟件 軟體 software, program
輸液.點滴 IV, give an IV
疼 痛 pain, hurt
液 Taiwan yi4, Mainland ye4?
Oh, and since I don’t think anyone has mentioned it yet, there’s a specific phrase for words that are ‘mispronounced’ in Taiwan vs. ‘standard’ Mandarin. They’re called 破音字 “broken sound characters”. Most Taiwanese people will readily admit that fa4guo2, for example, is a 破音字.
[quote=“RachelK”]Little Buddha, can you recommend any of those books listing vocab differences? I don’t know any, and I’d like to get one. I’m now doing medical interpreting in the US, and I’m coming up against a fair number of these differences.
Here are some more I know:
出租車 計程車 taxi
[/quote]
Mainlanders have also borrowed a term from Hong Kong for “taxi”: 的士
(pronounced “di4 shi4”; Cantonese “dik si”, from English “taxi”). In mainland China (at least the places I visited), to “take a taxi” is “打的” (pronounced “da3 di1” - yes, with the first tone on “di”).
Another big difference is that for a lot of tech terms, Taiwanese just use the English, or a transliteration. Mainlanders use an awful lot of complex Chinese terms in order to avoid too many English terms entering the language (kinda like the French). But, in areas where there are a lot of Taiwanese businessmen, that is probably changing somewhat.
Here’s a Forumosa thread on hypercorrection involving the retroflex consonants. Nothing on n/ng, though. Maybe I imagined that one. :s
[quote=“RachelK”]
[snip]
Oh, and since I don’t think anyone has mentioned it yet, there’s a specific phrase for words that are ‘mispronounced’ in Taiwan vs. ‘standard’ Mandarin. They’re called 破音字 “broken sound characters”. Most Taiwanese people will readily admit that fa4guo2, for example, is a 破音字.[/quote]
Po4yin1zi4 are characters with multiple pronunciations. It has nothing to do with differences between Taiwanese Mandarin pronunciation and Chinese pronunciation of Mandarin.