Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 625  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   comes only later in the book, if at all. Let us mention a few examples of concrete publications: • The English textbooks and treatments focused on providing a descrip- tion of the sound system of p t nghuà : [Dow 1972] (syllable structure very briefly introduced on p. 98), [Huang 1981] (no information), [Ma 1999] (no information), [Chin 2006] (gives the syllable structure some- what more attention on p. 65), [Lin 2007] (syllable structure introduced on p. 106). One of the exceptions to the rule is a textbook by [Speshnev 1972] (in Russian, not in English) already mentioned above: the author sketches out a syllable scheme at the very beginning (on p. 11; note that Speshnev’s treatment of finals is based upon the unique system of [Dragunov and Dragunova 1955]. • The textbooks and treatments published in Chinese in the P. R. C. : below are examples of the organization of chapters in some of these books. The last example is the only one from many publications known to us which puts the chapter about syllable structure before the chapters dealing with the initials and finals. ...Initials — Finals — Syllable — Tones... [Wu et al. 1992] ...Initials — Finals — Tones —  Syllable ... [Huand and Liao 2002; Wang et al. 2002; Cao 2008] ...Initials — Finals — Tones — Modifications of sounds —  Syllable ... [Ma 1999] ...Vowels — Consonants —  Syllable — Initials — Finals — Tones... [Wang 2003] The next observation to make is that in the chapter “Syllable” one does not usually find a lucid hierarchical scheme of the syllable. There may be some sort of a structured table [Wu et al. 1992: 128; Huang and Liao 2002: 90; Cao 2008: 103], or even just a verbal explanation. To sum up, the Chi- nese (text)books — quite naturally — do employ the traditional concepts of an initial and a final, yet a student receives only the first two lines of the scheme presented in Figure 2. The complete analysis of the syllable structure regularly comes rather late — after treating and practicing the initials, the finals and whole syllables. Such an ordering has a major disadvantage: if a chapter “Syllable” comes too late, a student has no knowledge of the inner composition of a final while learning Mandarin syllabary. The subsyllabic components within a final (i. e. a subfinal, a medial, a main vowel, and a ter- minal) are not introduced early enough, consequently they cannot be utilized in teaching.