Talking in Tones
T
he great linguistic divide in China has been of a tremendous interest to me. Many people believe that Chinese is a language spoken in China. To an extent, it is true but there is also a different aspect to it – it changes from province to province. Apart from the minority languages, there are over hundred different dialects that the Chinese have such as standard Chinese i.e. Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Hakka and others. In fact it’s a bit like India. While Hindi may be the umbrella in the north, under it hundreds of regional languages and local dialects bloom. Even though a majority of the major languages may have had its root in Sanskrit, every region has its distinct languages within which thrive many dialects. But that’s where the comparison ends as unlike Indian languages the Chinese is the same for all dialects, whereas in India every language, such as Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam etc, has its own script.
In China, some dialects resemble the parent language more than the others. For example, in the local dialect of Shanghai (Shanghainese as they call it), ‘Hello’ is what I would probably represent as ‘nong hou’ which is very similar to ‘ni hao’ of mandarin and ‘ngi hao’ in Hakka. But the same ‘Hello’ can sound very different in Cantonese, the second most popular dialect after Mandarin, as ‘neih hou’, in Fuzhou dialect as ‘nu ho’ and ‘non ho’ in Wu dialect. Similarly ‘Goodbye’ is ‘zaijian’ in Mandarin and ‘zoikien’ in Hakka dialect, whereas it sounds completely different as ‘tzei wei’ in the Wu dialect – Its ‘cai gieng’ in Fuzhou dialect, ‘joi gin’ in Cantonese. A non native Chinese speaker will not even realize that the conversation is heading to an end. Well, these are only a few greetings in local dialects and one need to deal with them if you travel from place to place
in China but the real problem crops up when you can speak Chinese and yet miss or pronounce an inaccurate tone. For a native Chinese speaker too, specifically a Cantonese speaker, it is easier to learn the Taiwanese pronunciation because they have more contact with the southern standard dominated by Taiwanese pronunciation. Mandarin has five tones: high, rising, dipping, falling and neutral which makes it tough for a non Chinese speaker, whereas, Cantonese has about nine tones which adds to further confusion. It is any day easier for a foreigner to learn Mandarin than Cantonese, specifically for English speakers. By way of adding a little spice to the subject, let me explain that since Chinese is a tonal language, you can convey different meanings by pronouncing the same sound differently (in different tones). For example, if you are attempting to say ‘can I ask’ (in the sense of asking a question), the word for ‘ask’ in Chinese is ‘wen’ in falling tone. If you pronounce ‘wen’ in rising tone instead of falling tone, it can mean ‘can I kiss’ (you is obvious). It was in Shanghai in fact when a friend had a narrow shave with a Chinese woman who was selling dumplings on the street. Wanting to buy a bowl of dumplings and also try out his newly-learnt Chinese his experiment went awfully wrong. Instead of asking ‘How much for a bowl of dumplings’ (yi wan shuijiao duo shao qian?), his wrong tones put forth something far from the price of dumplings and something that sounded like ‘How much for a night’. Surely he did not get his bowl of dumplings. These are a few notes of caution to demonstrate how crucial it is to be accurate in pronunciation to be a fluent Chinese speaker. Apart from tones, pronunciation can also be tricky. For the first few months, people cope with different sounds and pronunciation; even then they kind of mix it up. An example will explain this better, ‘fan’ is ‘food’ in Chinese, so when you want to say ‘I want to have some food’, you have
to make sure you say ‘wo yao chi fan’, because ‘fen’ which is a closer sound to ‘fan’ means ‘stool’. This difficulty can be overcome by regular practice and eventually you can sound as perfect as a native Chinese. Chinese has a large vocabulary but one can read almost any non-technical book or newspaper if one knows about 8000 Chinese characters without much difficulty. If there’s one word comprising three characters and you know only two, you can draw a meaning of the other by understanding the context in which it is being talked about. Also, Chinese language has no sense of ‘time’ and it becomes extremely difficult to reflect present and future tense, specifically, because both are written the same way. Having overcome all this, Chinese language learners often feel that sense of achievement and confidence that they can tackle any problem in the world if they have tackled Chinese. Chinese is easily going to be the next dominating global language like English has been so far. However, it will never replace English. In the coming years, people across the globe will want to learn more and more about China, as a country, as an economy, as a culture. Therefore Chinese language too will gain popularity. So learn Chinese and be ahead of the game.
MANJU HARA is a Research Scholar at Jawahar Lal Nehru University.
January-February 2011 India-China Chronicle |39|