An ex-student doing a family tree has been picking whatever's left of my brain on anything to do with Chinese that crops up in her project, e.g., the pinyin romanisation for the characters of names provided by some relative for members on the family tree.
One of the names she gave me had a mismatch between the character and the pinyin romanisation against it.
After giving her the right pinyin, I explained why such "errors" (according to the rules of the adopted standard spelling system) occurred, as below:
The Chinese do not think in terms of letters of the alphabet strung together (romanisation, in this case pinyin), but in ideograms (i.e., characters), so what might be obvious to the English-speaking mind (e.g., there’s a difference between z and zh, -n and -ng) won’t be to them.
This means that one will find someone with the surname 張 / 张 spelling his own surname as Zang rather than Zhang. People speaking with a Taiwan accent will say tīn for 听 tīng / listen. And so on. [Hence the "wrong" pinyin for the name she sent over.]
To give you an idea of the linguistic challenges faced by outsiders (non-Taiwanese in the case of Taiwan, me specifically in 1975–6):
In my initial days in Taipei, I was given some coins by my flatmate from Tainan 台南 (in the south, where they mainly speak the southern Chinese Minnan dialect) for making calls from the public phone box.
They were copper coins worth NT$.1, and had the image of a telephone set on one side and the words 電話專用 (diànhuà zhuān yòng / “telephone special use”) on the other.
I’d interpreted that to mean “need those coins for phone calls”, not the usual silver NT$.1 coins, which were the same size. (It turned out to be: “these copper coins are phone tokens only, can’t use them to pay for shopping”, rather than “can make phone calls only with these copper coins, not other coins”, like the Italian gettone* telephone tokens which couldn’t be used for any other purpose.)
When I ran out of the phone tokens, I asked my Tainan flatmate, “打電話的錢，怎麼換 / dǎ diànhuà de qián, zěnme huàn”, for where do I go to (ex)change NT$.1 coins for these special phone tokens?
She said, in Chinese, “Oh, you know those slots on the top of the telephone towards the back? You just insert the coin into that slot.” I didn’t understand what she was on about, so I repeated my question. Got the same answer back.
A few more attempts later, I discovered that southerners change [ha! word play] all “f” sounds to “h” (e.g., 吃飯 chi fan becomes chi huan), so she was saying huàn-jìn-qù for 放進去 fàng-jìn-qù / “release enter go” / put/insert [it] in. After twigging, I said, “啊，你是說放進去 / ah, ni shi shuo fàng-jìn-qù / ah, you mean insert it?” She nodded, “對對，huàn-jìn-qù, huàn-jìn-qù,” just doing an umbrella “h” for both 換 and 放, completely unable to hear the difference between my 換 huàn / to change and my 放 fàng / to release.
A year later, we had a new draftsman (at Conoco Taiwan). When he found out that I was from Singapore, he said to me, “ni fui bu fui shuo Zhongguo fua?” Huh?? It turned out that he was from the Hakka 客家 kèjiā dialect group, who turn all “h” sounds to “f” (會不會 huì bu huì to fui bu fui and 中國話 Zhongguo huà to Zhongguo fua), so he was saying “Do you know how to speak Mandarin?”. To convey the confusion-causing version from him, I've made up the English to be, "Do few know fow to speak Mandarin?"
I didn’t know until I met him that the Fujian/Minnan speakers did the f-to-h conversion whilst the Hakka speakers went the opposite direction. So, unless you know beforehand which dialect group the speaker is from, your brain wouldn’t be ready to do the conversion.
For someone fresh from Singapore who’d never been exposed to these regional variations, it was terribly confusing — I spent a lot of time trying to decode things said to me, which is fun in hindsight but was very much “Is my Mandarin THAT bad?!?!“ at the time.
I have since discovered, in dribs and drabs over the years here in London, that, apart from the Fujian/Minnan and Hakka regional variations I was thrown into in Taiwan in 1975–6, there are more of these horrors out there (not in any order of importance / significance):
- h/f and n/l: People from the province of 湖南 Húnán will say they’re from Fúlán (I actually looked up the map of Fujian province one year, thinking Fúlán must be in Fujian as there is a Fúzhōu in Fujian, so the Fu in Fulan must be another Fujian town; took ages of trawling before it dawned on me)
- -ng/-om ending: People from 雲南 / 云南 / Yunnan province will say Kom fuzi for 孔夫子 Kǒng fūzi / Confucius; and chom for 蟲 / 虫 chóng / insect
- n/l: Cantonese speakers will say lei for nei (你 / nǐ / you)
As an interpreter, I shudder to think how many more there are of such variations out there — as many as there are places, I imagine (big or small, provinces or even villages).
Talking about it here has just brought alive a memory from my childhood days: we at home used to laugh at other Teochew (dialect) speakers for saying things differently from us (e.g., for “dark”, ang ang instead of am am), and that’s just the same Teochew dialect group alone!
Someone once told me that Norwegians are like that too. Places that might be, say, only half a mile apart as the crow flies will have such different accents because they’re separated by fjords, so the distance between them is actually much much bigger: to reach each other, they have to go all the way down to sea level, then all the way up again, so they’re really very far apart from each other, reflected in the huge linguistic differences.
* Gettone: http://wisardcoin.altervista.org/Standard_Files/Articles/Gettone_ENG.PDF
