New Post
Search
Help
ArchivesFor Mike — pronunciation of Zhi, Shi, Zhihao
I've been using this site for a long time, but I'm not too familiar with using the forums, so apologies if this is the wrong place to put this post.
It seems that some of the pronunciations of Chinese names on this site are wrong. Specifically, I've noticed the pronunciations for Zhi and Shi (and thus also Zhihao) in the main name collection are wrong (and some of the submitted names too, though obviously those ones are not the priority to correct).
For Zhi and Shi, the IPA on the site for the consonants (zh and sh) is right, but not the 'i' part, since this is not a "ee" sound, but more like saying "er" in American English with your tongue more pushed forward. I've looked into it and it seems like there's some differing opinions within the linguistic community on how to represent this in IPA, though with official IPA letters it seems like the consensus is most often [ɻ̩], though [ɨ˞] and [ʐ̩] are also sometimes used. Also pretty relevant in representing Chinese in IPA are the Karlgren letters, which are unofficial to the IPA but used by many linguists to represent sounds in sinological languages in IPA. The Karlgren letter for the sound in Zhi and Shi is represented with [ʅ].
Here are some sources I used for the IPA stuff:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/article/abs/revisiting-mandarin-apical-vowels-an-articulatory-and-acoustic-study/DA325F52844304100950A8B4FEAF6240 (concludes that [ɻ̩] represents this sound)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinological_phonetic_notation (Karlgren letters)
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp052_chinese_ipa.pdf (section IV has a comprehensive chart that translates Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and other romanizations into different IPA versions, though it should be noted that this source is from 1994 so maybe uses some outdated IPA.)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305639269_Phonology_of_Mandarin_Chinese_Pinyin_vs_IPA (this one has a less comprehensive chart, but it is more recent)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Syllabic_consonants (citation [a] shows examples of different representations for the i in zhi and shi in IPA)
It seems that some of the pronunciations of Chinese names on this site are wrong. Specifically, I've noticed the pronunciations for Zhi and Shi (and thus also Zhihao) in the main name collection are wrong (and some of the submitted names too, though obviously those ones are not the priority to correct).
For Zhi and Shi, the IPA on the site for the consonants (zh and sh) is right, but not the 'i' part, since this is not a "ee" sound, but more like saying "er" in American English with your tongue more pushed forward. I've looked into it and it seems like there's some differing opinions within the linguistic community on how to represent this in IPA, though with official IPA letters it seems like the consensus is most often [ɻ̩], though [ɨ˞] and [ʐ̩] are also sometimes used. Also pretty relevant in representing Chinese in IPA are the Karlgren letters, which are unofficial to the IPA but used by many linguists to represent sounds in sinological languages in IPA. The Karlgren letter for the sound in Zhi and Shi is represented with [ʅ].
Here are some sources I used for the IPA stuff:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/article/abs/revisiting-mandarin-apical-vowels-an-articulatory-and-acoustic-study/DA325F52844304100950A8B4FEAF6240 (concludes that [ɻ̩] represents this sound)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinological_phonetic_notation (Karlgren letters)
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp052_chinese_ipa.pdf (section IV has a comprehensive chart that translates Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and other romanizations into different IPA versions, though it should be noted that this source is from 1994 so maybe uses some outdated IPA.)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305639269_Phonology_of_Mandarin_Chinese_Pinyin_vs_IPA (this one has a less comprehensive chart, but it is more recent)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Syllabic_consonants (citation [a] shows examples of different representations for the i in zhi and shi in IPA)
2
Replies
You are correct. I missed an exception in the pronunciation of pinyin i after z, c, s, r, zh, ch and sh. These will be fixed for the next update. Thank you!
1