A few months ago, I made a video about Standard Chinese, talking about its phonetic inventory,
phonotactics, and exploring what effect this has on word structure, and why this,
along with the use of purely literary words,
shows the disadvantage of transliterations like pinyin for writing Chinese.
Now, that video's got a lot more views than when I first released it... which is really great to see!
I really appreciate the positive comments, even from what seems to be a Chinese native speaker
who seemed very happy with the video... which is really cool, but unfortunately...
There was a comment which asked me about... my methods.
I never thought I'd be at the point where I'm
starting to have to actually justify the stuff I say... but here we are.
In the video, I say this:
"...difficult to count the exact number of these, but the two things I came up with that make the
most sense to me, is either 30 phonemes, counted like this, or 36 phonemes, counted like this."
And Max here asked me, specifically, what those two vowels in the 30-phoneme
count of Standard Chinese were, which is a very valid question.
Would have been nice if I had known the answer.
Now I don't mean to say that I got to these conclusions by just
making it up... I'll have you know I spent a long time staring at Chinese phoneme charts...
but it was a few months ago that I made that video, so by the time Max asked the question,
I didn't have that information on hand anymore.
But I hate to leave anyone disappointed... so I had the bright idea of saying that I'd...
that I'd make another video about Standard Chinese.
One without me saying any Chinese words,
so don't worry I won't be butchering the pronunciation of "keng" again.
By the time Max assured me that they really only wanted to know
what those two vowel phonemes were, I'd already dug through piles of paper in my room.
By the time this person had already answered the question, I'd already started writing this script.
So you're going to have to sit through all of this to get an answer I could have
just typed out in another comment... which somebody already DID type out.
Here you have: how to count the phonemes in Standard Chinese.
Let's start at the beginning: what is a phoneme?
A phoneme is a unit of sound,
which in a certain given language has the ability to differentiate words.
The key to understanding phonemes is minimal pairs.
A minimal pair is a pair of words, within a language,
which are distinguished from one another by only one sound.
In English, we can take, for instance, "cold" and "gold".
The only distinction between these words is this sound here - "cold"
uses the voiceless velar plosive, while "gold" uses the voiced velar plosive.
Because of this minimal pair, we can establish that /k/ and /g/ are separate phonemes in English.
But what about "scold"?
That [kʰ] sound in "cold" is not the same as the sound in "scold".
One is aspirated; the other is unaspirated.
Aspiration is a strong burst of air which comes along with the release of a sound, so you can
actually feel this difference for yourself if you put your hand in front of your mouth.
When you say "cold", at least as a native speaker,
you'll feel the burst of air in your hand, which you won't when you say "scold".
However, this unaspirated [k] sound is not a completely separate sound.
If you say [k]old or s[kʰ]old, though it'll feel unnatural,
people will still understand what you're saying.
There are no minimal pairs to distinguish [k] and [kʰ] in
English, so they are known as allophones of the same phoneme.
But take, for example, the velar nasal /ŋ/, and glottal fricative /h/.
They have, in English... no minimal pairs. I mean, think about it: the /h/ sound only appears at the
beginning of syllables, whilst that /ŋ/ only appears at the end, or before velar plosives.
So yeah, there's no time where this sound alone distinguishes words.
In English, a real minimal pair purist here would say... "yup, that means /h/ and /ŋ/ are
allophones in complementary distribution... parts of the same underlying phoneme.
But most linguists would make an exception here,
because these two sounds are so phonetically different.
If i went up to an English person and talked about the "ngat on my ngead",
they'd think I was speaking a foreign language,
not understand that I was simply using an allophone of the glottal fricative...
which is why most linguists would classify these as separate phonemes despite the
fact that they are technically in complementary distribution.
So those are our two standards for determining phonemes going into this:
minimal pairs, and phonetic resemblance.
Now, let's look at Standard Chinese. Before we go anywhere with this, we have to talk about tones.
Some phonemes of a language are segmental, like vowels and consonants, while others
are suprasegmental. This means that it carries over several smaller segments.
But the same rules apply: we're looking for minimal pairs that distinguish these
suprasegmental phonetic features to see if they are separate phonemes.
Take, for example, English and French, which both have the suprasegmental feature
called "stress", where some syllables are emphasized more than others in a word.
In English, we can actually find minimal pairs which are distinguished only by their
stress pattern - take, for instance, the noun "insight" when compared with the verb "incite".
These are identical in every way... apart from
where the stress falls. So we call this "phonemic stress".
On the other hand, in French, stress is decided by largely predictable rules, and there are no
minimal pairs distinguished by stress alone, meaning French has non-phonemic stress.
In Standard Chinese, we have the tone system, which can differentiate words,
shown here again with the ma/ma/ma/ma/ma distinction.
In all these five words, the segmental phonemes are the same,
and only the tone, or lack thereof, is different.
So no matter how we analyse the segmental phonemes,
it seems sensible to say that we have five suprasegmental "tonemes".
And in the original video I made,
we can see that both of the phonetic analyses I used agree on this.
Now for those segmental phonemes: vowels and consonants.
People will tend to pronounce the same sounds with slight variations,
but for the sake of broader phonetic analyses, we ignore these minor differences and collapse these
sounds into phonetic transcriptions that are distinguishable for any given person.
When we've narrowed down all the different personal variations of sounds people make,
we get a chart of Standard Chinese phonetics that looks like this...
but how useful is this really?
Let's not forget that unlike English, which has relatively few phonotactic restrictions,
Chinese syllables function as an initial-final combination.
They're incredibly fixed. Remember this chart? This is the pinyin transliteration
of Chinese phonology, which gives us these five vowels.
This analysis includes 22 consonants,
including the velar nasal /ŋ/, which can only occur in syllable codas.
We then have a special phoneme, which is "zero onset", and it acts as a 23rd consonant.
There are two main reasons I can find that it isn't analysed as just a lack of phoneme.
Firstly, it's often realised as an audible sound, depending on dialect, idiolect,
and the preceding word, such as the glottal stop, and the breathy voice glottal transition.
Secondly, the strict syllable structure of Chinese is easier to analyse consistently
if we include zero onset as a phoneme in its own right.
Now, as you see, this analysis hinges on the fact that the syllabic consonants seem
to be considered allophones of this vowel phoneme.
This is because they act like vowel segments, since they appear as the
nucleus of syllables, and they occur in complementary distribution with /i/.
This is kind of an upper limit for the number of phonemes in Standard Chinese.
Advantages: makes it easy to read pinyin, it keeps analysing syllable structures more consistent...
Disadvantages: we just analysed the lack of onset as a phoneme and that's weird,
there's a lot of unnecessary phonemic distinctions being drawn here,
but at the same time [z] and [ɻ] sound nothing like [i].
That phonetic resemblance has really gone out the window...
so if we want to move things around a bit, we can start by separating this out into a
syllabic consonant phoneme, and keep these sounds out of the /i/ phoneme.
Although we've created an extra phoneme here, this actually simplifies things.
You'll see that now that these are phonemically distinct... the retroflex
series and the alveolo-palatal series are now in perfect complementary distribution!
They have no minimal pairs - that means we can fuse them together, and call the
alveolo-palatal series allophones of their retroflex counterparts before certain sounds.
And this time they aren't that phonetically dissimilar!
Oh, and we don't need these glides! We can analyse them as consonant allophones of high
vowels - there's no minimal pairs here, and you can hear Chinese speakers treat,
say, [i] and [j] as part of the same phoneme.
The syllable written like this ("yi") in pinyin can be pronounced both /i/
and /ji/, with speakers often not hearing the difference,
and even single individuals using both pronunciations in the same conversation.
This analysis is my personal favorite. Advantages: it's pretty easy to read pinyin, Wayde-Giles and
bopomofo; only relatively phonetically similar sounds are considered allophonic; we can still
consistently analyse syllable structures; and there's not so many superfluous phonemes.
Disadvantages: still consider zero onset of phoneme which is still weird;
and probably something else that someone will shout at me for in the comments.
To get to the second analysis I used in the video, we do two things.
One: we get rid of that zero onset phoneme. No-one cares about it,
it's just a lack of sound, it's not phonemic, ignore it.
Two: (and God knows why) we put the glides back in, and then call the high vowels vocalic
allophones of them instead of the other way around, leaving us with only two vowel nuclei.
Advantages: it's easy to read bopomofo, and we don't have that silly zero onset phoneme anymore.
Disadvantages: it's stupid and... why?
Reading about phonemic analysis has been
very interesting and very tiring. It's got me thinking about the phonemes of Chinese a lot.
Like, you could probably cut the list down to 29 phonemes by fusing the syllabic consonant
back into the other consonants as allophones of the word initial [ɻ].
I've also seen some analyses with zero vowels, and only underlying glides,
though I'd be lying if I said I understood how those worked...
others saying that the zero onset should be seen as a word initial allophone of the velar nasal...
But I hope that answers your question, anyway.
"Modern Standard Chinese is often called Mandarin,
which is a stupid name so I'm going to call it Standard Chinese."
God damn it, I have to stop just SAYING stuff, people are going to expect me to explain...