281–290 of 309 posts
I was the one who solved this. It was an exciting time
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Hmm, I recently thought it would be a great idea to answer a question on SO again, and did that by first posting a link. Then I realized how useless that would be if the link disappeared, so I clicked edit and pasted the actual info. All this took like 20 seconds, but the hounds had already descended. Someone had posted a note on an answer that was literally 20 seconds old saying that it could be improved. When I res…
You wanted to report them for asking you to do the thing that you also thought had to be done? What would you even report them for? Giving valid criticism? Responding quickly?
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I don't get it. What does "every day up" even mean?
It is derived from a famous quotation from Chairman Mao. 好好学习，天天向上 "Study well, [and] improve every day." Making progress is conceived of as "upwards" movement.
Same concept exists in brazilian portuguese, at least in certain circles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porglish
> Upar or uppar
> to up (on a level; slang term used for RPG games by Brazilian players, instead of Port. evoluir)
> to upload (instead of rarely used Port. subir – the opposite of baixar, the literal translation of download)
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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 -…
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 pronunc…
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?
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is there a way to show [flagged] and [delayed] ?
[flagged] shows on comments when flags significantly outweigh downvotes. [delayed] shows when a comment isn't being displayed yet because it's still less than N minutes old, where N is the 'delay' setting in the commenter's profile (about which, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ). Does that answer your question?
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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 pronunc…
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, b…
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.
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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, b…
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 th…
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.
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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 th…
> 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 wor…
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.