In English and Ohio with subtitles

[muckefuck]

I was perusing the Reader at lunchtime and came across this curious line in a review of the Chinese film 盲山 (Blind Mountain): "In Mandarin and Shaanxi with subtitles." Curious, because "Shaanxi" is the name of a province, not a language. More curious still because 陝西話 or "Shaanxi talk" is another name for Guanzhong dialect (關中), whose prestige standard is the speech of Xi'an, and Guanzhong dialect is Mandarin. True, some versions of Mandarin are greatly divergent from the Beijing-based standard (Sichuan speakers in particular get singled out for incomprehensibility), but Guanzhonghua isn't one of them. So altogether, it's rather like saying "In English and Ohio with subtitles."

Of course, not everyone in Ohio speaks the same dialect and the same is true of Shaanxi. In the northernmost areas, the local speech varieties are reckoned to the Lüliang (呂梁) dialect of the Jin sublanguage (which, such distinctions being subjective in any case, some linguists consider just another kind of Mandarin). In the mountainous south begins the Southwest Mandarin speech area which stretches thousands of kilometres through Sichuan to the edges of Yunnan and even into northernmost Thailand. This, it turns out, is probably the dialect group intended, as Chinese-language summaries of the film describe it as taking place in the Qinling (秦嶺) range of southern Shaanxi.

But how did the reviewer know this? No mention of "Shaanxi" as a language appears in any other English-language reviews and summaries I've found online, so presumably it's not part of the press packet materials, and it beggars belief to imagine that a reviewer named "Andrea Gronvall" has the technical background to distinguish Chinese speech varieties. My guess is that there must be some reference to dialect differences in the film, which concerns the kidnapping of an "urban university graduate" who is forcibly married to a mountain villager. There may even be something in the subtitles about the coarse, unintelligible "Shaanxi dialect" of the natives.

Comments

[joebehrsandiego.livejournal.com]

Sort-of-tangetially, did you see the Latin kerfuffle on my dear friend David's LJ?

http://annoyinghandle.livejournal.com/199830.html

Crazy!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Deo meo! What a grammar wreck!

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

My friend Micah's roommate from this past schoolyear was from Sichuan. I believe at one point a Chinese-American friend of mine, a native speaker of both English and Mandarin, commented about Fung's speech that, "yeah, they speak with a really bizarre accent over there".

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, he was taken aback the first time I showed him any linguistic analysis of Chinese. He had had Chinese language instruction--his parents are native speakers and he spent most of his growing-up in international schools in China and Malaysia--and can read and write it, but he's never really had the same degree of analysis of it as he's had in English as part of his education. So when I exlpained and illustrated that most Americans couldn't tell the difference between his surname (Zheng) and several similar-sounding Chinese words, he was flabberghasted.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Boy has a sheltered life. Knock him up in the morning for a fag, will ya?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

That's all right. My Sei Yap daughter corrects my Mandarin all the time, and boggles at my Southwestern Ohio dialect.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

But if her native variety is Taishanese, then what does she correct it to?

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

No, it's actually Kongmoonese from Sei Yap, and it's the expression of her name, for example; ç‰ å½© - I always have a problem with the Cai / T'sai 'catch' in the initial consonant sound

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Oh, that didn't show up right....
玉 (yu)
彩 (cai)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Should've learned German first! That's the same sound in Zeitgeist.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

OOOOOOH! Well, I do know German, and I do know how to pronounce that one correctly. Thanks!

Now, to rip the rotten little kid when she gets home from her gifted class at noon. Think you're a smart l'il bugger, do ya? Well, Daddy can say your name now without you rolling on the floor laughing. Take that!

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, I need to push her harder on German. She wants to be able to sing the Schiller poem in the 'Ode to Joy' in the original, and she's trying to get it phonetically.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Fǔruìde shèna gètafènken!

Für meine Tochter aus Elysium:

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Got the rest?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

really? I'm pretty sure that's not how we'd say it round Kirch-Sieg way - I can't bring myself to use the same vowel for ö and u in Götterfunken.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's not the same vowel: Pinyin e ranges anywhere from [ɛ] to [ɤ] with several stops in-between.

(I'm wagering that, being a Southerner, she might have [u] in fen; in Beijing Mandarin, all instances of /fun/ and /fuŋ/ have become /fən/ and /fəŋ/, respectively.)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

that'll show me for sticking my nose in when I don't know the frame of the discussion. Though I credit the pain I went through over German vowels as a kid with preparing me for carioca ones as an adult.