I’m sure there are more cases of discrepancies like this, but this is the first one I noticed. I recently learned those bu pu mu fu characters (zhuyin?) and noticed that the shen in shenme (what) should be she2 (according to the zhuyin).
My ear has always told me it was she2, but the books have always been written as shen2.
Ok, I investigated further (before posting) and found out that there are 2 different characters for shen2/she2. It’s no big deal, but I find it strange that the zhuyin would have the equivalent of she2, but the pinyin doesn’t match. Is there a reason why?
This has always bugged me and my husband can never give me an answer. Then I’m further confused because people pronounce it without the ‘h’ as in ‘se me’.
both in zhuyin fuhao (bopomofo) and hanyu pinyin the proper romanization or phoneticization of “what” in chinese is shen2me…the tone i’m not sure about but i’m definite that, at least in beijing, the word is pronunced with a ‘sh’ and with an ‘n’ at the end of the first syllable.
I’ve always thought it weird that pinyin uses ‘shen’ with an ‘n’. Zhuyin uses what are the equivalents of ‘sh’ and ‘e’ in pinyin. That seems more accurate to me. There’s no 100% standard 1 to 1 mathc between pinyin and zhuyin. Remember they’re not ‘Chinese’ but a system of romanising the Chinese. I’ve never heard ‘shenme’ spoken with a nasal ‘n’ in the middle of it, so I think the zhuyin is more accurate.
This is just because many Taiwanese people can’t distinguish between “s” and “sh”. It is due to interference from Taiwanese.
According to the Far East Chinese-English Dictionary the pronunciation is she2. However, my understanding is that she2 is the formal pronunciation while shen2 is more common in everyday speech.
Interestingly this character also can be pronounced shi2 where it can mean ten or miscellaneous.
Maybe we should just wait for Ironlady to give the definitive answer
It’s interesting, that, Juba. Chinese teachers here will sometimes say that the ‘er’ sound is common to all mainland mandarin speakers. Teaching materials produced in Beijing appear to concur with this. Yet none of my friends from Sichuan, Shanghai and Guangdong used the ‘er’ sound. Only the Beijing friends and a friend from Haerbin used it.
That’s right. There are a lot of linguistic differences that many Taiwanese people think are Taiwan/mainland Chinese differences, but acutally they are North/South differences or Beijing/non-Beijing differences. Another example is ting versus man for quite/rather/very. Ting in northern China and man in the south.
As to the “er” ending, it seems that the further away you go from Beijing, the less people use it. You can’t just stick “er” anywhere - Basically it can be applied to things that are small and/or nice and/or fun. Usually it is applied to nouns, but also some measure words and certain verbs, e.g. wanr = to play or have fun. Beijing people would never say wanr without the er ending. There are some words to which probably only Beijingers would apply it, e.g. motocher = motorbike, honglüdengr = traffic lights (robots.)
If you want to say that, then you’d also have to say that Chinese characters aren’t really “Chinese.”
Your statement seems to be suffering from a bad case of what I call the “comics myth,” under which no one really speaks or hears Mandarin or any other Chinese language. Instead, when they would speak, they instead have bubbles filled with Chinese characters that rise from their mouths, just like in comic strips. And the “listeners” don’t really hear Mandarin but instead just look above the “speaker” and read the characters.
Zhuyin is no more accurate than hanyu pinyin. This is a linguistic fact.
Shen is spelled exactly the same way in the Wade-Giles, Yale, MPS2, Tongyong Pinyin and Hanyu Pinyin romanizations, as well as in the base spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The same is true for she and me. Have a look at the comparison charts for yourselves.
People here have been asking the wrong question. There is not a fundamental difference between zhuyin fuhao and romanization systems in this matter. The correct question is “How come sometimes (usually when reading zhuyin fuhao) I see the first morpheme of the Mandarin word for ‘what’ as having the soundshe, and other times (usually when reading hanyu pinyin) I see the first morpheme of the same word as having the soundshen?”
Back to the original question. Is there a reason why?
I understand that both pinyin and zhuyin are the same when read properly, but in some books if you read both out loud, one (pinyin) will read as shen2 and the other (zhuyin) she2. :?
I did, and it too has both spellings. Look up shen and she.
In Northern Chinese, “er” doesn’t only go behind things, we basically put “er” behind everything. I used to study in Tianjin, and I tried for months (to no avail) to stop putting an “er” behind my xiexies when I moved to Shanghai
However, the sung xiexie they use here, I picked up really fast. But I automatically go back to my northern xiexie-er when I go back to Mainland :?
[quote]Sir Donald Bradman wrote:
I’ve always thought it weird that pinyin uses ‘shen’ with an ‘n’. Zhuyin uses what are the equivalents of ‘sh’ and ‘e’ in pinyin. That seems more accurate to me. There’s no 100% standard 1 to 1 mathc between pinyin and zhuyin.
Huh?
Quote:
Remember they’re not ‘Chinese’ but a system of romanising the Chinese.
If you want to say that, then you’d also have to say that Chinese characters aren’t really “Chinese.”
Your statement seems to be suffering from a bad case of what I call the “comics myth,” under which no one really speaks or hears Mandarin or any other Chinese language. Instead, when they would speak, they instead have bubbles filled with Chinese characters that rise from their mouths, just like in comic strips. And the “listeners” don’t really hear Mandarin but instead just look above the “speaker” and read the characters. [/quote]
No, there’s a difference between a ‘writing system’ and a ‘system of phonetic notation’ (I think there’s official linguistics terms for these, but I don’t know them). While the former is rarely purely phonetic, the ‘notation system’ is an attempt to represent the sounds that are heard. It’s like the difference between ‘written English’ and KK phonetics. My point in saying that “pinyin is not really Chinese” is that just because in pinyin there is an ‘n’ at the end of the syllable, doesn’t mean that there is an ‘n’ sound in spoken Chinese.
Quote:
I’ve never heard ‘shenme’ spoken with a nasal ‘n’ in the middle of it, so I think the zhuyin is more accurate.
I never said it was. I said that in this case it is more accurate. By that I mean that if every letter (or combination of letters) in pinyin, or every symbol (or combination) in zhuyin, is meant to represent a certain sound, then the pinyin ‘shen’ is less accurate in representing the sound of the word than the zhuyin eqivalent.
This is a case of the written language not mapping quite so well with the spoken. What’s more “authentic?” Well, considering that most of the world’s languages are not written down, and that far more people use spoken language for communication than written, the language learner is well advised to trust what s/he hears people speaking. (Of course, our own hearing is not always trustworthy, is it?)
You will not hear the /n/ sound in the Mandarin word we’re talking about–“what”. Moreover–though native Mandarin teachers may not even perceive it–the first syllable in “shenme/sheme/etc.” is in fact pronounced in the third tone.
As pointed out, you will see two different characters for this first syllable:
Isn’t also the case that Hanyu and Guoyu are also two slightly different standards set by scholary fiat? Standardized pronunications for Guoyu were set by a team of Republican scholars in the 1930s while the Hanyu pronunciations were standardized in the 1950s in Beijing. As a result, there are numerous discrepancies between the Hanyu and Guoyu.
Example:
wei1xian3 ‘danger’ Hanyu
wei2xian3 ‘danger’ Guoyu
What makes things more confusing in Taiwan is that the vernacular here now uses many pronunciations that are not in the Guoyu standard–it is 70 years old and was an artificial standard anyway. Two examples
xie2chi2 ‘to compel by force’ is almost universally pronounced ‘xia2chi2’ in Taiwan even by television broadcasters
jun1lie4 ‘cracks [in a wall]’ usually pronounced gui1lie4
These ‘errors’ are character based, but they are used so widely by native speakers that they have effectively become a part of the lexicon.
[quote=“Sir Donald Bradman”][quote]Sir Donald Bradman wrote:
[quote]
I’ve never heard ‘shenme’ spoken with a nasal ‘n’ in the middle of it, so I think the zhuyin is more accurate.[/quote]
I never said it was. I said that in this case it is more accurate. By that I mean that if every letter (or combination of letters) in pinyin, or every symbol (or combination) in zhuyin, is meant to represent a certain sound, then the pinyin ‘shen’ is less accurate in representing the sound of the word than the zhuyin eqivalent. [/quote][/quote]
<Sigh.> Let me try again. :?
It’s wrong because zhuyin as a system is not more accurate than pinyin in this or any other case. Pinyin does not prescribe using “shen” for “she.”
It is the practice of using “shen” (or its equivalent) rather than “she” (or its equivalent), not the system, that is at issue in this “what” question.
I’m not trying to give you a hard time. If I’m being picky about this, it’s because there are all too many misunderstandings about the nature of romanization, and I don’t want to let chabuduo but still inaccurate explanations reinforce these in those who don’t know better.
Cranky (may I call you cranky) isn’t talking about the accuracy of either system. If they wanted she in pinyin all they would have to do is write “she”, the question is, “Why would some books choose to use shen instead of she?” When read “properly” the accuracy of both are exactly the same. It’s just strange that a textbook (the Shida text’s if you’re curious) would have it “spelled” 2 different ways.
If you replaced all the zhuyin with it’s pinyin equivilent, one column would read she and the other would read shen, and that to me doesn’t make any sense.
