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