Final summary

Final report of my self-tutorial project

1. What I've worked on
During the past few weeks of my self-tutorial project, I tried to practice my archetype at least once a day. Though my hometown dialect also belongs to the Wu sub-group (The dialect sub-group Suzhou dialect belongs to), there are some major differences that I paid attention to.

My archetype is a clip of a talk show, so I had a hard time trying to keep up with the speed of the speech. Then I decided to break the whole speech into several sentence groups to research the subtle features of the pronunciation. I also used my transcription which is fully transcribed in Suzhou phonetic symbols when I practiced and each time I marked the things that should be improved in the future.

Here are some features I focused on:
~Consonants~
Suzhou dialects pretty much turns all the voiceless consonants into voiced ones:
                                                                         /s/---/z/

辰光【zen-kuaon】 （time） ，人民【zen-min】（people）  ，石头【zah-deu】 （stone）

one exception to notice here: /z/ 's pronunciation varies according to  the position in a word.

                                                                         /t/---/d/
                                   账单【tsan-te】(bill)  ，账台【tsan-de】 (cashier)

~vowels~
vowels in Suzhou dialect are not affected by consonants and there are way too many vowels in Suzhou dialect than in Mandarin Chinese.

Triphthongs is a distinct characteristics and very challenging for me and I noticed some features of them:

                                             /niyɛæ/
我在微博上转发了两条苏州绕口令。
(I posted two Suzhou dialect tongue twisters on my Chinese Twitter.)

a. Triphthongs are often pronounced longer and in 4,5, or 6th tone;
b. they are usually functioned as metric foot and are emphatic;
c. there are usually open-ended.

Velar nasal /ŋ/ also needs constant practice because unlike it is in Mandarin, Suzhou dialect places it in the word-initial position. To me, it almost functioned as a consonant.
Also,  /ŋ/ in Suzhou dialect is more back than normal high, back  /ŋ/ in English.
   /ŋɒ/
庙外一只猫。There is a cat outside of the temple.

~tones~
Tones system is much complicated in Suzhou dialect because we have seven tones.
To practice tones, I used listening discrimination skill to break down the whole speech into small segments.
Tone sandhi phenomenon can be very tricky for me so at first my hypothesis was that Mandarin rules also applies to Suzhou dialect.

2. Related materials and resources:
Since there is no official website for Suzhou dialect, I found a BBS created by Suzhou dialect speakers which including many pronunciation tips, history and slang in Suzhou dialect. http://www.suzhouhua.org/home/
Here is another Suzhou dialect gimmick my friend suggested that I practice for tones, prominence, and intonation pattern. http://youtu.be/F9SB6wfWmi8

3. My final attempt:


~A comparison to the archetype~
I'm satisfied with the consonant and vowel clusters. I have made much progress on triphthongs and velar nasal /ŋ/ because at first I'm very worried about how to fully pronounce triphthongs. However, my tones and intonations still need polishing.

4. Final thoughts

I think breaking down the transcription is helpful to my segmental and supresegmental features practice. Also, it is always nice to turn to my Suzhou dialect speaker friend to listen to some more authentic samples which is produced in a more natural environment.

Speech in the talk show is, according to my friend, a little bit exaggerated to make his points, but I find that helpful for my intonation practice because the stress patterns and prominence are more obvious and easier to distinguish and imitate.

Week 11 prominence, intonation and more practice

Last few weeks, I mainly focused on the segmental features of Suzhou dialect, and this week most attention was paid on prominence and intonations.

As I repeatedly mentioned before, Chinese is a tonal language, which means differences in pitch on the same syllabic unit can signify differences of meaning. In mandarin Chinese, thus, the intonation units are separated by thought groups like they are in English; however, we tend not to use prominence to highlight or place focus on an element because Chinese has "very flexible word order which means the highlighting of information may be achieved by moving various sentence elements to the beginning or end of an utterance" (Celce-Murcia, 2010, p.226). For example:

我下周去俄亥俄出差

 wo xia zhou qu e hai e chu chai.

I will go on a business trip to Ohio next week.

If we wish to emphasize the time of the business trip, we will put the time phrase at the start of the sentence:

下周我去俄亥俄出差

 xia zhou wo qu e hai e chu chai.

NEXT WEEK, I will go on a business trip to Ohio.

However, when I tried to apply these rules to Suzhou dialect, it seems that Suzhou dialect does not follow the pattern. I'm really confused about how Suzhou dialect places its prominence because according to my archetype, the stress is not regularly placed on the sense groups or in order to achieve grammatically coherent structure. For instance, for interrogative sentences, interestingly, some of them are in rising tones and the others are in falling tones, making it even more difficult to distinguish.

I talked to one of my friends who are a born-and-raise Suzhou citizen, trying to figure out the intonation pattern. According to her experience, "I cannot conclude many rules or patterns, all I can say is that Suzhou dialect tends to be in a very high pitch when stressing something and it has a very elegant rhythm like music."

Of course, such description does not help a lot, but she did suggest that I should try to listen to some folk songs (usually without music) and explore the patterns there.

I took her advice and try to imitate the intonation pattern in this folk gimmick and it turned out to be a little bit easier because syllables with pitch 5 occurs in regular intervals.

Here is my practice of the gimmick:

Week 10 intonation pattern and more practice

I started to notice that the general fluctuation of Suzhou dialect is more obvious and complicated than Mandarin Chinese,probably due to the fact that there are more tones and triphthongs in Suzhou dialect.
In order to grasp the intonation pattern, I listened to the archetype while marking the intonation on the script.

In Mandarin Chinese, at the end of the sentence or sense group, the intonation is usually dropping; however, in Suzhou dialect, as we can see in the script, some of the sentences end in a rising intonation which is usually used in interrogative sentences. In addition, contrary to Mandarin Chinese, the pauses between two clauses in a sentence are mainly rising.
Listening discrimination skill really works in distinguishing intonation patterns and helps me focus on the suprasegmental features of the archetype.
Here is my practice trying to imitate the archetype according to the script:




For the following weeks, I will pay more attention to other suprasegmental features and tonal changes.

Week 9 stress and tone sandhi in Suzhou dialect...

English is known to be a stress-timed language which means syllables are grouped into metric foot which contains strongly stressed syllables, lightly stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, causing it to have a regular rhythmic beat while Chinese, to the contrary, is a syllable-timed language with tonal changes as its major characteristics. It means that Chinese has fairly regular stress on each syllable. Thus, when Chinese learners speak English they, as Celce-Murcia said, "tend to stress syllables in English  more equally, without giving sufficient stress to the main words and without sufficiently reducing unstressed syllables.

Also, Chinese language does not have much variations in assimilation, linking, or other connected speech features because we have very clear word boundaries. The situation also applies to Suzhou dialect.

However, as I mentioned last week,we use different pitches and tones to make stress and distinguish different words. For instance, in English lexical stress will result in part-of-speech alternations between nouns and verbs while in Chinese different tones with the same consonants and vowels combinations signals  different meanings. For example, "yi sheng" with both words on first tone means "medical doctor" and if the second word changes into fourth tone the meaning changes accordingly to "the whole life". 

We have 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese and 7 tones in Suzhou dialect.

In certain cases, the tones of syllables will change when they are combined into words or phrases. These tone changes are called "tone sandhi". These changes are not written out in Pinyin, but they are used when we say words and phrases. Here are the sandhi rules in mandarin Chinese:

3 + 3 => 2 + 3    你好(hello) ni3hao3 => ni2hao3

3 + 1 or 2 or 4 => 3* + 1 or 2 or 4, where 3* means a third tone without the final rise 

你听 （you listen!）ni3ting1 => ni3*ting1

yi1 + 1 or 2 or 3 => yi4 + 1 or 2 or 3  一天(one day)  yi1tian1 =>> yi4tian1

yi1 + 4 => yi2 + 4 一面(one aspect) yi1mian4 => yi2mian4

bu4 + 4 => bu2 +4  不是 (no!)   bu4shi4 => bu2shi4

Tone sandhi also appears in Suzhou dialect.

qi 523               qi 44                  

                                      

mi 231                 mi 23                                             

This week's practice!

Week 7-8 Tones and more practice

I focused on the tonal changes of Suzhou dialect in Week 7 and 8.

In Mandarin Chinese, there are four tones:

1. The 'first tone' or 'high flat tone' 
2. The 'second tone' or 'rising tone' 
3. The 'third tone' or 'dipping tone'
4. The 'fourth tone' or 'falling tone' 

The tonal system of Suzhou dialect is a little more complicated than Mandarin Chinese. 

In Suzhou dialect, tones are not exactly as they are in Mandarin and we have 3 more tones.

I tried to match tones in Suzhou dialect with mandarin tones:

Mandarin                                  Suzhou Dialect

first tone                                                 1 

                                                             2

Fourth tone                                            3

Third tone                                              4

                                                             5

                                                             6

second tone                                           7

Here are my demonstration of these tones in Suzhou dialect:

1 yin pin: 开 /kɛ/  to open

2 yang ping: 爬 /bʊ:/ to crawl

3 shang: 水 /sjʊ/ water

4 yin qu: 看/ku/ to look

5 yang qu: 笨 /ben/ stupid

6 yin ru: 只 /tsa/ measure word for puppies

7 yang ru: 白 /ba/ white

Here are some more practice focusing on consonants and vowels I mentioned last few weeks:

Week 6 triphthongs and "nasalization" in Suzhou dialects

As I mentioned in the last week's blog, there are two features of vowels in Suzhou dialect that are really challenging and interested to me.

Basically, I felt the vowels in Suzhou dialect are not affected by the environment. They do have nasalization, but as far as I've known of, the vowels are rarely influenced by consonants.

Triphthongs are very common in Suzhou dialect, making Suzhou dialect "the softest dialect in China" because triphthongs' frequent appearance in Suzhou dialect makes it sounds rather rhythmic.

In the archetype, I found two triphthongs:

                                          /niyɛæ/
我在微博上转发了两条苏州绕口令。
(I posted two Suzhou dialect tongue twisters on my Chinese Twitter.)

/miyeɛ/

庙里一只猫。There is a cat in the temple.

I tried to describe the triphthong in IPA symbols, but I'm not sure if they are accurate. At least, they sound like that from my ears.

For both triphthongs, I did feel the tongue movement from high to low position.

Nasalization in Suzhou dialect is not entirely the result of nasal consonants coloring. some of the diphthongs are influenced by the consonant /n/ that follows the vowels, others do not have consonants preceding or following the vowels.

I'm not entirely sure if there is an /ŋ/ before the vowels, but I did feel the velum are partially open.
Here are the examples from my archetype
   /ŋɒ/
庙外一只猫。There is a cat outside of the temple

          /ŋæ/
庙外猫咬庙里猫。The cat outside of the temple bites the cat                                          inside of the temple.




The following is a video of a German who are trying to speak Suzhou dialect. It's real fun!

Week 5 Vowels in Suzhou dialect

Vowels in Suzhou dialects are based on six simple vowels:
         a          e        i       o         u          y

        /ɑ/         /ɛ/      /i/      /ɔ/        /ʊ/       /iy/

Above is the vowel chart I retrieved from Wikipedia. Since there is no official vowel chart published by government or other authorities, I assumed this chart is collected and made by some phonology scholars and it seemed to me the chart is made by some non-native speakers because there are far more diphthongs and triphthongs not included in it.

Below is a vowel chart concluded by some experts of Suzhou dialect who are all native Suzhou citizens. It is not presented in IPA style but in pinyin and distinct phonetic symbols used in Wu dialect.

From the chart above, we can see that vowels in Suzhou dialect are far more complicated because there are many triphthongs and some tricky diphthongs; however, unlike English, we do not have glides in the system.

Next I'll focus on the two features of the Suzhou dialect, triphthongs and nasalization (not exactly the same nasalization in English, but for now let's just call it that) frequently appeared in my archetype. 

Week 3 & 4 Consonants in Suzhou dialect

I mainly looked into the features of consonants in Suzhou dialect this two weeks.

Before looking into how the consonants work in Suzhou dialect, I first checked out the consonants in 

Mandarin Chinese.

There are several distinct characteristics regarding the consonants in Mandarin:

Most of the consonants are voiceless;

Aspirated and non-aspirated consonants are in complementary distribution （Different Phonemes）;

Velar Nasal sound /ŋ/ only appears in the end of nasalized diphthongs. Not syllable-initial.

Avelar Nasal /n/ can be both syllable-initial and in the end of nasalized diphthongs.

The rest of the consonants are all syllable-initial.

Suzhou dialect is actually a sub-type variant of Wu dialect which is one of the seven regional dialects in China and it possessed a history of five thousand years. Most of the other dialects in China is based on Beijing dialect which is the phonological base of Mandarin Chinese. Unlike Mandarin Chinese, Suzhou dialect preserves many phonological and tonal features in Ancient Wu dialect, so several consonants and vowels existed in Suzhou dialect  do not appear in Mandarin Chinese. These distinct consonants and vowels are very difficult for me to imitate and pronounce and maybe that is the reason that Suzhou dialect could only be understood by speakers of Wu dialects (Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc). by the way, the distinct feature of Suzhou dialect makes it extremely difficult to decode, which is the perfect language for sending out confidential information during wars.

Here is the consonant chart I retrieved from Wikipedia:

In the discovery of consonants, I noticed two very interested features:

1. Almost all the voiceless consonants are pronounced as voiced consonants, regardless of aspirated or unaspirated. For example:

账单【tsan-te】(bill)  ，账台【tsan-de】 (cashier)

The second characters of these two words have identical tones and vowels except for the consonants, however, when I listened to the archetype, I found both of them are pronounced as voiced stops by the speaker.

2. /z/----/s/ 

/z/ is a very interesting consonant in Suzhou dialect. /z/ changes its pronunciation according to its position in a word and in a sentence.

辰光【zen-kuaon】 （time） ，人民【zen-min】（people）  ，石头【zah-deu】 （stone）

When /z/ is placed at the beginning of a word and the word is the first word in a sentence, /z/ changed into /s/, however, when the word is in the middle or at the end of the sentence, /z/ is voiced. Interestingly, I also noticed the speaker changed again when /z/ is in the middle of a word, such as 今朝 【jing-zæ】（today），/z/ becomes a voiced fricative.

Here is my practice: https://soundcloud.com/rui-xu-1/week-3-4

Week 2: issues of tones in Suzhou dialect

This week I mainly focused on distinguishing tones in Suzhou dialect.

There are mainly 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese, first tone (marked "1"),second tone ("2"), third tone ("3"), and fourth tone ("4").

Unlike Mandarin Chinese, Suzhou dialect, derived from Middle Chinese, has 7 tones theoretically.

In traditional Chinese phonology, syllables that ended in a stop in 

Middle Chinese (i.e. /p/, /t/ or /k/) were considered to belong to a 

special category known as the entering tone. These final stops have 

disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, with the syllables 

distributed over the other four modern tones in different ways in 

the Suzhou dialect. 


In Suzhou dialect, the final plosives are not deleted completely as they are in Mandarin Chinese, they gradually reduce to glottal stops /ʔ/.


However, in the actual daily pronunciation not all the 8 tones are pronounced which depend on the voicing of the consonants.

Here is a chart for the tone system in Suzhou dialect. 

(retrieved from Wikipedia)

Topics for further practice:

It seems that the phenomenon of "tone sandhi" appears in Suzhou dialect where one word possesses two or more different tones and its tone varies according to the word combination.

Week 1 archetype and introduction

My archetype:

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/TlDQ51rdiFA/

My first attempt

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/First%20Week.m4a?_subject_uid=96283127&w=AADtGJJBjL6ZD7RawhuILLdd_85HciBnu3nkO8Hlr6jYOg

I choose Suzhou dialect as the main target for my self-tutorial project.

The Suzhou dialect ( 蘇州閒話, IPA: [səu ʦøʏ ɦᴇ ɦo]), formerly romanized as the Soochow dialect and now also known as Suzhounese, is a branch of the Wu languages, one of the families of oral Chinese. Suzhounese is spoken in the city of Suzhou in China's Jiangsu province and is the traditional prestige dialect of Wu. Considered one of the most flowing and elegant languages of China, even effeminate, it is rich in vowels and conservative in having many initials. (Wikipedia)
Though I'm basically a Suzhou citizen, I was born and grew up in Shanghai so I've never learnt to speak Suzhou dialect; however, since Shanghai dialect and Suzhou dialect are very similar, it would be not that difficult for me to imitate Suzhounese.
The clip I choose for this project is from one of the most famous TV talk show programs in Suzhou in which the host is talking about a tongue twister about a cat and a temple, which sound similar in Suzhou dialect.

There are several features I will work on in the following weeks:1. Initials:Suzhou dialect has a set of voiced initials and exhibits unvoiced unaspirated and aspirated stops, there are unvoiced and voiced fricatives sets.
2. Rhymes: Suzhou dialect has several unique diphthongs, nasals and glottal. It even has a triphthongs.
3. Tones: Suzhou dialect has seven tones, making it extremely difficult to imitate.