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.