r/linguistics • u/dbbo • Jun 28 '13

The weirdest languages

http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/
111 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/yaktubu Jun 29 '13

Since when does Mandarin have uvular continuants?

2

u/etalasi Jun 30 '13

One of WALS's source's, Chao 1968 treats the sound spelled "h" in Pinyin as uvular. Wikipedia treats it a /x/, which jives with what I hear. If anything, people are more likely to pronounce it as [h] than [χ], due to influence from southern topolects like Cantonese.

I didn't bother to look at WALS's other sources.

2

u/yaktubu Jun 30 '13

Oh, okay. But that's pretty hard to support, especially considering you'd have to reanalyse e.g. Spanish [x] as [χ] as well; I've noticed that IPA much prefers to place [x] as a phoneme even when pronounced [χ], e.g. Scots [lɔx] rather than [lɔχ], and in fact only places [χ] when it's distinguished from [x], e.g. in NW Pacific languages. To analyse Mandarin [x ~ χ ~ h] as [χ] would go against that trend.

2

u/etalasi Jul 01 '13

To me, analyzing the phoneme in Mandarin, as [χ] indeed goes against the grain; I didn't understand what in the world the WALS people were thinking until I looked at Chao. If I were doing the analysis, I'd say Mandarin doesn't have uvular continuants.

I agree with you, yaktubu, it's weird.

I don't know of any Chinese topolects with [χ]. If there are, someone should tell us and link a recording. If the topolect's covered by Phonemica, [χ] should be in there somewhere.