Monday 2 May 2016
Why do Chinese people confuse their Ls and Rs?
Hello! I was looking for a video on Youtube to answer this tricky question: why do Chinese people confuse their Ls and Rs? And I couldn't find a half decent video on the issue - there were some awful ones by some white Americans trying to comment on the issue and I was like, don't even go there, you don't even speak Mandarin and you wanna try to explain this to me? Urgh. So I thought, well I'll make my own video on the issue since I do speak Chinese (and I have my theories.) I deliberately refused to do an impression of a bad Chinese accent on the video. The fact is loads of Chinese people have that problem - yet few people are able to say why it is an issue for Chinese people. I have identified three reasons, but perhaps you have other theories? Let me know what you think, many thanks for watching.
Some common pitfalls i observed:
ReplyDelete- Chinese people tend to use replacement Mandarin words to phoenetically learn English words. A B C becomes 哎 鼻 赛. Japanese people tend to do the same thing with katakana.
- No respect for silent letters, Wednesday, chassis, salmon amongst a few commons offenders.
- The "i" sound being replaced. Miss becomes mees, fish becomes fees etc
- The "th" sound ends up sounding like "si" thing becomes sing.
Yup, PRCs say "sank you" whilst Singaporeans say "tank you" - both are wrong of course, but wrong in different ways.
DeleteHi Alex, just to point out something regarding the Rome example. the rouma might really meant something else that could be confused with at that time when the official translators were trying to find a way to say that name. Just as you have written it down, it might have meant "flexible horse", a term that might be implying something weird and it might really be disrespectful to name the country in such a way. Since luo was more used for names, they might have settled for that.
ReplyDeleteHi Weiping, as for the example of Luoma - I am guessing that back when they first needed to translate Rome into Mandarin a long time ago, nobody really cared how accurate the translation is phonetically as hardly any Chinese people were going to speak/read/understand English or Italian so if they say it's Luoma, that's what it will be and no one will ever look it up in any other language. And once they used Luoma, the name stuck.
DeleteOh there's also an element of "we'll call it whatever we wanna call it" - ref: translations for France, Germany, America, UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, etc - and those are just countries. Then you have the continents - like Africa? Europe? The Americas?
DeleteMind you - English does the same shit. How the hell do you get from Deutschland to Germany?
Standard Mandarin is just the spoken tongue which was deemed as the official spoken language in Beijing. In reality, Chinese is a written language and most Chinese actually use rather different spoken tongues depending on where they are hailing from. Where Southern China is concerned, the major spoken tongues in the region, Yue (Canton family) and Min (Fujian group), all have no "R" like sounds. I had asked a native Shanghainese friend who also mentioned that the Wu spoken tongue used in the Jiangsu / Zhejiang region similarly uses no R like sound. The "R" like sound probably is prevalent only in the northern Mandarin-like tongues. I suspect that how all the "R" like anglosaxon sounds became the "L" like modern day sinicised terms was simply due to habit and being unused to rolling the "Rs". Both my folks have their mother tongues being a southern dialect and although they are pretty fluent in Mandarin, they can barely pronounce the rolling tongue Mandarin words. Just hearing Pa pronouncing the words "然后" in Mandarin is just ...... a bit of a faux pas as it came off sounding like some genitalia description in his heavily Teochew accented Mandarin. Yup, I think your monkey see monkey do second reason was probably the best explanation.
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