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

 637  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   When students begin to study a foreign language, they tend to make in- tuitive assumptions about the orthography of the studied language, which sometimes turn out to be right and sometimes turn out to be wrong. These assumptions may be of the following sort: that a particular letter represents the same or similar sound as in their native language, that one letter regularly represents one sound, that what is written by using the same letter sounds more or less similar, that all letters are “equally important”, that each letter has to be pronounced, that each sound they can hear is represented in the script by a separate letter, etc. Let us give some contrary examples from the English and Pīnyīn orthography: • sometimes one letter represents two sounds: Engl. si x [siks] , Pīnyīn b o [pwɔ] • sometimes two letters represent one sound: Engl. th at [ðæt] , Pīnyīn sh u [ʂuː] • sometimes a letter is not pronounced as a separate sound: Engl. k now [nəʊ] , Pīnyīn r i [ɻː] • sometimes one letter represents several rather different sounds: Engl. a ll ( [ɔː] ), b a t ( [æ] ), a te ( [eɪ] ), a rrive ( [ə] ), Pīnyīn m i ( [iː] ), m i e ( [j] ), ma i ( [ɪ] ), s i ( [ ɿː ] ), sh i ( [ ʅː ] ), or Pīnyīn m u ( [u] ), x u ( [y] ) • a letter often represents rather different sounds in both languages: Engl. c lass ( [k] ), c entury ( [s] ), Pīnyīn c ao [ts h ] , or Engl. b uy ( [b] ), Pīnyīn b ang ( [p] ) • some letters may be “less important” than others, that is they represent a sound which is not acoustically / perceptionally prominent, or may even be absent in pronunciation; cf. the weak forms of English function words such as for, do, are, would, has (e. g. the English and may be pronounced as [ən] or even [n̩] if unstressed: fish and chips ), or the monophthongiza- tion of Mandarin falling diphthongs in fast speech (e. g. the unstressed preposition g i 给 “to” may sound as [ke] ), or the devoicing of Mandarin high vowels following the fricatives in unstressed syllables (e. g. dòufu 豆腐 “bean curd” may sound as [toʊ̯fu̥] , or even as [toʊ̯f] ). • some sounds are not represented in the script at all: Engl. cure [kjuə] , Pīnyīn gui [kweɪ] , etc. Let us focus on Pīnyīn orthography . For some of the problematic cases there is no other solution than to learn the orthographic rules mechanically, as they are more or less arbitrary. For example, omitting / e / in a final / uei / (e. g. gui is phonologically / guei /, not */ gui /), or omitting / o / in a final / iou / (e. g. xiu is / xiou /, not */ xiu /), or writing a main vowel / u / with a letter “ o ” in some cases (e. g. dong is / dung /, not */ dong /), or writing a terminal / u / with a let- ter “ o ” (e. g. gao is / gau /, not */ gao /). These rules probably have a practical