Laozhen? --- to close the thread on pronounciation

June 13, 2006

Ann,

First of all, I agree this pronounciation thing is deviating noticeably... I'd

like to close my part with only one e-mail by pulling them back and relate to

the CM topic.

I'd say most people who use Chinese as a primary language in their daily life

would know this term, Lao Zhen, or Luo Zhen.

BTW, Par, it's not a mistranscription. They are different pronounciations for

the same characters in Chinese. The character for " fall " can be pronounced as

either Luo(4) or Lao(4). People in different parts of China have their own

preference; however, with modern transportation/migration/communication, you

will realized both are used even in one conversation. Such variation is called

Puo Yin Zi ( " broken " sound character) in Chinese language study, meaning the

pronounciation is varied for a specific term (Ci) only. In the case of this

term, one can say Lao Zhen or Luo Zhen, but when it's used with the character

for behind(Hou) to mean falling behind, vast majority will say Luo Hou instead

of Lao Hou.

Getting back to Eric's reply to my response on Xu.

Let me tell you the truth Eric, I did a survey of the usage among my relatives

and their friends with ages ranging from early teen to early fifties in Taipei,

very few people are aware of the Xu usage. Great majority of them use Xun for

the same things you talked about. And I believe what you said was your true

experience too. What all this illustrates is the possible short-term and

locality-dependent nature of the language usage in Chinese. This is further

examplified in the variation of pronounciation for the same words pronounced in

different Chinese-influenced Asian language such as Taiwanese, Cantonese,

Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Fukianese spoken in South East Asia. So,

how's this related to CM? My take is, reflecting on the pronounciation of

Chinese characters as part of the Chinese culture evolution, it's not difficult

to imagine that the future of CM will evolve into different variations in

different parts of the world. Your partaking in the CM evolution

will help shaping how it looks like in your part (or virtual part, given the

modern communication tools) of the world.

Mike L.

snakeoil.works wrote:

June 13, 2006

Mike,

Thank you for all these interesting clarifications. I must say, I don't

understand the nervousness about discussing such matters on this list. After all

the admonition about the essentiality (!) of learning Chinese for understanding

CM, I don't know why interesting discussions of words should be discouraged.

Understanding the nature of Chinese does seem to play a part in trodding the

long road to understanding the subtleties of communication in a linguistically

and culturally foreign landscape. There are various stumbling blocks to learning

Chinese and the issues you've outlined below characterize one of them. It's

natural as a human being to have one's eyes glaze over when something seems

incomprehensible or strange, rather than probing the difficulty, which might in

fact yield little pearls of understanding.

" I took the road less traveled by,

and that has made all the difference. "

The inestimable Mr. Frost

(full text here: http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html )

Ann