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