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

 627  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   An onset can contain up to four consonants, e. g. vztlak “buoyancy”. A nucleus is mostly a single vowel, e. g. med “honey”, sometimes a syllabic consonant /r/ or /l/ , e. g. krk “throat”, vlk “wolf”, quite rarely a diphthong / ou/ , e. g. louka “meadow” (other diphthongs than /ou/ occur only in loan- words). A coda can contain up to three consonants [Palková 1994: 271], e. g. z bst “to feel cold”. Let us review the major consequences of the discrep- ancies between the Czech and Mandarin syllable structures for the Czech learners of Mandarin and for the Chinese learners of Czech. (We shall also mention some other differences between the phonological structures of both languages.) • If we leave aside the words of foreign origin (e. g. automatický “au- thomatic”), Czech does not have any indigenous diphthongs except for /ou/ . This diphthong does not contain any glide — both elements have a stable, clear articulation more or less identical to a respective monophthong. As for the glides, Czech students are familiar with the sound [j] . However, in Czech /j/ has the phonotactic characteristics of a consonant, occurring either in a syllable onset (e. g. in jíst “to eat”), or in a syllable coda (e. g. in můj “my”) — not of a glide func- tioning as a component of a diphthong. Consequently, Czech students often mispronounce Mandarin syllables containing rising diphthongs or triphthongs. They erroneously use a medial and/or a vocalic termi- nal to make up the extra peak(s) of sonority, breaking a syllable into two, or even three syllables (pronouncing xie as * [ɕi.je] , xiao as * [ɕi. ja.ʊ] or * [ɕja.ʊ] , etc.). The falling diphthongs are also difficult for them: they tend to overpronounce the terminal vowels / i / , / u / , wrong- ly attempting to reach the articulatory targets of the high vowels [i] , [u] . They may even pronounce the terminal / i / as an approximant [j] , pronouncing mai as * [maj] etc. (for a correct pronunciation of the falling diphthongs, see below). Note that even the native speakers of languages which, unlike Czech, abound in diphthongs, might still not pronounce the Mandarin diphthongs correctly. This occurs, even though some of these diphthongs may be phonologically identical to those of Mandarin (e. g. /ai/ is found both in Mandarin and in Eng- lish). This is because the articulatory and acoustic properties of diph- thongs vary among languages — e. g. the articulatory targets may be slightly different, the transition between them may have different forms, a temporal structure of a diphthong may be different etc. [Cao 2007]. • Although the most common syllable type in Czech (as well as in oth- er languages [Duběda 2005: 139]) is “the optimal syllable” CV, the