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

 628  Hana Třísková   syllables containing consonant clusters are nevertheless very com- mon there. Consonant clusters can be found both in an onset ( vztlak ) and in a coda ( z bst ). This feature of the Czech syllable obviously does not lead to any problems for the Czechs learning Chinese, but often causes trouble for the Chinese learning Czech: they tend to make up a separate syllable for each consonant involved, as is regu- larly done with the words/names of foreign origin occurring in the Chinese context (e. g. the monosyllabic name Kl au s is turned into a trisyllabic form K e. l ao. s i ). • Czech has two rather common syllabic consonants /r/, /l/ ( krk “throat”, vlk “wolf”). Again, this fact does not pose a problem for Czech learners of Chinese. Indeed, exactly the opposite occurs — the familiarity with the notion of syllabic consonants can be advantageous as the grounds for explaining the pronunciation of the Mandarin syllables zi, ci, si, zhi, chi, shi, ri : according to many authors, the nucleus of these seven syl- lables is formed by a syllabic consonant (the other alternative, accepted by Pīnyīn , is to view their nucleus as an “apical vowel”). Yet Chinese learners of Czech may have trouble with the syllables containing syl- labic vowels. • A velar nasal /ŋ/ is not present in the inventory of Czech consonantal phonemes. A sound [ŋ] does occur in Czech, but only as a product of assimilation: it is a positional variant of /n/ followed by a velar stop /k/ or /g/ within a word (as in the word lanko /lanko/ “cord”: it is pro- nounced as [laŋko] ). Consequently, Czech speakers often wrongly in- sert a velar stop [k] after [ŋ] — both in Mandarin syllables such as bing , mispronouncing it as * [piŋk] (the correct form is [piŋ ̚ ] ), and in English words such as song , mispronouncing it as * [soŋk] (the correct form is [sɑŋ ̚ ] ). • Unlike English (or fast colloquial Mandarin), which is considered to be a “stress-timed language” , Czech has the features of a “syllable- timed language” . This means that, at least in standard pronunciation, the stressed syllables do not undergo any considerable lengthening, while the unstressed syllables do not undergo any considerable shorte- ning, or reduction of the segments involved. Due to this fact, Czech stu- dents often fail to pronounce the unstressed Mandarin syllables proper- ly, i. e. in a reduced way. They wrongly assume that articulating them in a “slurred” way fails to meet the standards of correct pronunciation. • Long and short vowels are distinctive in Czech, e. g. dal “he gave”, d l “further”. This often hinders Czech students from the due lengthe- ning of stressed syllables (as is a feature of “stress-timed languages”).