Abstract
This paper is intended to contribute to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in Hungary by filling a notable gap in the literature. There have been few studies of the specific differences between Hungarian and Chinese and none at all which apply contrastive analysis of phonetic and phonological systems for pedagogical purposes. After a brief general introduction of Hungarian and Chinese, the paper offers an in-depth comparison between the segmental and suprasegmental phonetic systems of the two languages. The comparison is divided into separate sections, each of which is further subdivided, dealing with consonants, vowels, syllable tones, syllable structure, stress and intonation. The paper continues with a discussion of which of the identified differences are likely to cause difficulties both in terms of acquisition by Hungarian learners and in terms of communicative efficiency. The two features that emerge as the most problematic are suprasegmental intonation and syllable tone. The latter, given its essential and pervasive semantic value, is proposed as the feature that deserves the most attention of teachers and learners.
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Notes
- 1.
Chao (1948).
- 2.
Lin (1996).
- 3.
- 4.
There are exceptions: a limited set of recent loan-words such as “auto”, which sometimes preserve the diphthongs used in their original languages.
- 5.
Note that Siptár and Törkenczy do not treat ‘dz’ as an independent consonant, but merely as the d + z cluster.
- 6.
- 7.
Again, it is both a matter of dispute, and of dialect- and speaker-level variation, whether this is really and always an uvular aproximant [Ξ] (e.g., Chao 1968, Pulleyblank 1984), or a velar fricative [x] (Duanmu 2000; Lee and Zee 2003), but whichever sound one perceives, or whichever description one subscribes to, it is certainly rather different from Hungarian glottal-laryngeal [h].
- 8.
Chinese [w] is more vocalic in nature, more like a brief but properly articulated [u], whereas English [w] is more consonant-like, and often also has a secondary velar articulatory trait which is absent from its Chinese ‘counterpart’.
- 9.
This sound occurs lexically only in interjections.
- 10.
This sound occurs lexically only in interjections.
- 11.
This sound only occurs after apico-dental affricates or fricatives.
- 12.
This sound only occurs after retroflex consonants.
- 13.
Note that in present-day Hungarian [ɔ] tends towards being pronounced with less lip-rounding as [ɒ].
- 14.
We are indebted to Andrea Deme (Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) for a very thorough discussion of this subsection. Note, though, that these passages do not represent her views.
- 15.
- 16.
And for that matter also for speakers of tone languages where tone is not a syllabic phenomenon.
- 17.
The translation is ours.
- 18.
Note that even so, the rate of morphemic homophony is rather high in Standard Chinese: usually there are several morphemes with identical segmental AND tonal content for each possible syllable.
- 19.
As above, “C” represents a consonant, “V” represents a vowel. “G” represents a glide, a shorter vowel that immediately precedes or follows the main vowel of a syllable.
- 20.
Luo and Wang (2002: 156–157).
- 21.
Prator (1967).
- 22.
Prator (1967).
- 23.
Dulay and Burt (1974: 37–53).
- 24.
Rogers (1969).
- 25.
Some authors also assume the existence of a third allophone of/a/: [ʌ], occurring in open syllables, as distinct from [a, ɑ] occurring before nasals or glides, and Xu (1980) lists as many variants as seven(!). Here we ignore this distinction as relatively insignificant – for some discussion see Duanmu (2000: 43–44).
- 26.
This is sometimes disputed (especially as regards the status of [o]), but their complementary distribution, as well as the fact that they are all (and in fact the only) non-retroflex mid-high vowels constitutes a strong argument in favor a single-phoneme analysis. Note though, that this also necessitates lexically constraining these rules to apply to word-classes other than interjections, because in the latter category [o], [ɤ] and [ɛ] are in contrast, in fact.
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Appendices
Appendices
1.1 A: Hungarian Consonants
In terms of place of articulation and manner of articulation, consonants in Hungarian and Chinese can be classified into the following categories (Tables 15 and 16):
1.2 B: Chinese Consonants
1.3 C: Hungarian Vowels
The descriptions of the vowels in Hungarian are shown on the following table, based on Siptár and Törkenczy (2000) (Table 17).
1.4 D: Chinese Vowels
The descriptions of the vowels in Chinese are shown in the following table, which is based on Huang and Liao (1991) (Table 18).
Some of the items in the above table are positional variants (allophones), so for example the sounds [a] and [ɑ] are allophones of a single phoneme/a/Footnote 24; likewise, [o, ɤ, e, ɛ, ə] together constitute a single allophonic system,Footnote 25 and [i, ɿ, ʅ] are also positional variants of a single phoneme/i/. Finally, the main vowel [ʊ] can also be economically regarded as an allophonic variant of [u]. The allophonic relations are summarized in Table 19.
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Ye, Q., Bartos, H. (2017). The Comparison of Hungarian and Chinese Phonological Systems: A Pedagogical Perspective. In: Kecskes, I. (eds) Explorations into Chinese as a Second Language. Educational Linguistics, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54027-6_2
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