uo'aXy'an Lesson Two: Pronunciation and Writing

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:12

   [Music] hello again and welcome to the next chapter in the Chien language video series in this segment we'll be going over the unique attributes of the Xian sound system how to pronounce the consonants and vowels with correct length and pitch on the syllables and we'll do a good kick start to the basics of reading and writing in the native script in game play seeing Shion will be more common than hearing long dialogues in it but language is fundamentally a spoken tool for communication so getting the pronunciation right is a basic requirement that everyone who wants to be proficient in the language needs to tackle right up front we have a lot to cover in this chapter so let's just jump

2. 00:01:03

   in and get started what I mentioned in the last chapter that the Shion phonology its sound system was inspired by several different Asian languages but there really isn't too much in it that's actually difficult to pronounce we already know the importance of pitch we had the example from the last lesson of nine Lua versus eat or drink law this is not radically different than the contrast we hear in our words desert and desert we say that these are stressed differently in English and Xian these would be considered at a different pitch that they go through different pitch changes we'll cover this in detail coming up but for now just keep in mind that it is important

3. 00:01:52

   bowel length is also important it is a different contrast that changes meaning in Shyam for example II short and low pitched means choice or selection versus II long in a low pitch meaning multiplying or duplication or even breeding perhaps this kind of distinction is not common in English in the sense that we are overtly aware of it on a day-to-day basis but think about pronouncing me as an eye versus the Emmy sound that we get in the word meme as in an internet meme me tends to be short but in meme the sound tends to be long Shion also has several diphthongs a diphthong is two or

4. 00:02:41

   more vowels that are thought of as one run on vowel in English we think of the eye and fight as being a long eye we call it a long eye but in reality in most of our dialects it is an ah sound run together with an e sound when you separate fight into two different syllables you get fought eat running them together produces the single syllable fight Sheehan has this same eye sound in both short and long variations as in chai meaning technology pronounced at a short length in a mid-level pitch and I a female name with a long length at a mid-level pitch the other most common diphthongs are all and aw they both have short and long versions as

5. 00:03:30

   well you heard OA in both Laura and Laura do you recall what they mean next let's talk about rounding this is what happens when a new sound comes before another vowel or diphthong we have it in English whenever a word begins with Q you kick vs. quick King versus queen it inserts a wolf sound a rounding of the lips between the first K and the vowel and she on the does this whenever it comes before another vowel or diphthong it's so pervasive and such a hard and fast rule that it's never necessary to write the letter W wah wool way we are dispelled with you as our wah wool way we there is no wow sound just a long ooh

6. 00:04:23

   do you recall the number 5 from the last less'n quoi and this is the case anytime you see it in you a is moi woman or female tu o n is Tuan want or desire CH UI is twee liquid or water it's not chewy twee h UI is we system organization layout su long a is SWA an amount of time the only time this is not the case is when the u belongs to a different syllable other than the one that follows it so just nu a is no ah meaning woman or female but Noah with a falling pitch inserted between two

7. 00:05:12

   syllables new and AH means freshly decaying meat the spelling difference is very obvious in the native Xian script which we'll be looking at coming up somewhat similar to rounding with o we also have palletization with Y in English we don't write it with Y but we have palletization in the words new and few and q in most of our dialects in Xi'an you will learn that sya is yacht meaning need and tya is chop meaning type or kind or version th wide long ong is the old meaning sad one of the most iconic sounds in Xi'an is the consonant cluster th coupled with L you will hear

8. 00:06:01

   it over and over again in the word layout meaning proper or correct we have it in English in the word athletic in the middle but in Xi'an it also comes up right up front as in the male name fluent pronounced at a low pitch before we talk in more detail about pitch it's important to learn what s our X is it is the abbreviation for standard romanized Chien and it is the way we write Xian including pitch marking in our alphabet the roman alphabet here are all the letters and combinations of letters that represent single sounds I'm going to pronounce each sound starting with the vowels and diphthongs ah oh oh oh ay-ee-ohh-ohh oh I I

9. 00:06:59

   wah wah wah wah we're way we we Wow Wow wah wah why why yeah yeah you're you're you you yeah yay Yee Yee Yau Yau you're you're yai yai note that each comes in a long and short version the long a is like a Y in the English of the bay now let's hear the consonants and consonant clusters using the vowel ah to illustrate them more clearly

10. 00:07:46

    ha ha ha ha ha ma na na da la da la cha cha cha cha crap yeah and we can't forget that you plus a is pronounced as if it were wah but it's never written with a WN SRX even if it has a W sound you should also note that chy sounds different than a regular ch cha cha cha cha do you hear the difference without the Y the tongue curls back the same thing happens with the X with the Y it's up against the back of your teeth also when either ax or CH come before E or E the tongue

11. 00:08:37

    moves forward to the teeth you might struggle a bit with this just practice when words with these distinctions come up likely the most difficult sound is ng before a vowel or diphthong please try all of these repeat after me na mo mu ya knee or you're able to do it if not realize that this is the same sound that English has in the word singing both in the middle of the word and at the end try saying singing without the C at the beginning ning-ning-ning an important part of SRX is how it marks pitch using

12. 00:09:28

    just three pronounciation marks the period the apostrophe and the double close quotation mark let me pronounce all of these for you lower lower lower lower lower when there is no mark the pitch is mid-range and flat lower when there is a period in the middle of the syllable the pitches love law when there is an apostrophe in the middle of the word the pitch drops at the break where the apostrophe is lower when there is an apostrophe after a period the pitch Rises lower when there is a quotation mark at the end pitch is as

13. 00:10:17

    high as it ever gets Lowa this pitch is of course relative to each person's voice these three punctuation marks are used with the Roman alphabet because they rather closely mimic the pitch markers that perform the same functions in the native script which we will get to very soon but first let's look a bit more at the sound rules of proper she on the syllable unit is very important in she own let's learn three technical terms from linguistics to talk about this those words are onset nucleus and coda on sets start a syllable and she on any of the consonants can be an onset including the tricky ng of law which means sweet as in the sense

14. 00:11:06

    of a gesture made by a child or an animal or how cute they are the nucleus is the vowel or diphthong that comes in the middle the onset can be missing or null Co does come at the end of a syllable and can also be null or empty Xian is somewhat picky about kotas unlike on sets it only allows m n ng th L R and very rarely k in some slang words the syllables low I'm low on low on low off lower lower are all okay but low op Louis Louis Louis Louis never occur naturally in the proper language also the language is

15. 00:11:57

    quite loose with the L versus R sound technically there is only a way to write L in Kota at the end of a syllable in the native script but you will hear it pronounced like a flap or tapped or trill are at times odd or an eater it's never rata sized as in English not R or or air ear be careful of that unless you want a strong u ee accent you will also hear chez swollen pronounced as chez sweatin even if it's spelled correctly with the xian l in the native script the L version is considered more proper the R version is a little more informal let's look and listen to some of the most unusual

16. 00:12:46

    syllables that Xian might allow now sure flying cave time yen certainly not all of these are words but they could be words the Xian could pronounce them now that you know more about SRX let's use it to learn the standard Xi'an letters in the native script here's a table you can find a downloadable version on the forum and you may want to have it printed so that you can pause this occasionally while you reference it it looks much more daunting than as her ex but most of it is completely logical once you learn to recognize the

17. 00:13:35

    individual parts it won't seem so overwhelming let's start by learning how to read the syllable shun which is the common abbreviation for Xian in the proper language all syllables begin conceptually at the upper left and proceed in a left to right and then top to bottom trajectory the onset for shun is the X Y letter pronounced for this purpose as chef so it goes at the left now we need the nucleus ah let's first put it at the right to get to shop but we also need the n sound in coda at the end of the syllable so to make it fit the AH has to be shrunken down and moved to the upper right this gives us room to

18. 00:14:23

    fit in a small n named in this case on at the lower right but we're not done yet son has a falling pitch so a pitch marker goes beside the small ah and it's a proper noun a name for the Shion people so they mark it as such by putting two lines side by side over the block now that you understand the basics of building a syllable block called an NK let's look at all of the kissing the individual letters I'll pronounce them as they are highlighted in the neutral mid-level tone ah II II oh oh oh i i i i err wah-wah-wah-wah vu this is only used

19. 00:15:23

    in special dialect spellings for a much later lesson where where we while war war why why where yeah yeah yo yo you you yay yay yi yi yow-yow your your yah yah yah ha ha ha ha ha ma na na na la la and sometimes are la cha cha cha claw crap and finally a special

20. 00:16:15

    character Yaya which only occurs with you diphthongs you'll likely quickly notice that the visual difference between a short and long vowel or diphthong is simply an extra dot inserted somewhere in the letter short o has only two dots long ol has 3 the Xian refer to their complete alphabet as we kissing shun which means Xian system of writing symbols when they talk about individual letters they simply say K plus the sound if is a vowel or diphthong or the sound plus aa in the case of the consonants so ki would mean the letter A the letter aa kid lot would refer to this symbol however when they spell out of syllable

21. 00:17:05

    block they simply give the sounds in the order they are written if a consonant comes in Kota it's pronounced with the avowal first so in in Kota as we just heard is called on the syllable block shun would be spelled sha Rothwell's 10 meaning XY plus a plus in in falling pitch as a name when Val standalone as in the word e meaning choice and E meaning multiply an inverted flipped l-shaped mark puts them into syllable block format it's merely a visual element and it's not pronounced this is also the case with most diphthongs such as owl meaning corporation the bulk of the kissing on

22. 00:17:55

    this chart are produced due to the rounded vowels with wool and the palletized vowels with y if you can learn to recognize how they look in their most compacted forms everything is suddenly much less mysterious Oh is defined most fundamentally by the shape you see here so when it combines with all we get wool with no middle dot necessary in the the Y used in palletization is abbreviated by having its to lower strokes move up the size of the upper one to form little wings as seen here in yah and yay and you'll the letters um on um off I'll and rarely och looks somewhat different from their

23. 00:18:45

    full-sized versions that can appear either on the left or the right of a block learning this is just a process of memorization and practice studying by using the syllables mum nun nun five la and can be helpful remember that sometimes speakers will pronounce brow and love as that and lad replacing L with an R sound when a vowel or diphthong appears in the upper right hand corner of a block it is technically called ping meaning small hence a ping popping whooping Epping etc the most difficult letters to recognize are the highly compressed rounded and

24. 00:19:34

    palatalized ping versions of diphthongs like Y and yo ah if you look closely you can find all of the strug's of all of the parts in the forms sometimes two dots end up on top of each other so that one cancels out the other and in this case you just see one of them but all of the forms are unique when compared to each other you will simply have to then there's no way around it and speaking of memorization one of the best ways to do that is to writing the letters by hand finally let's look at how pitch is marked on syllable blocks will use our syllable lo ah as an example mid level flat syllables have no marking at all lower low pitch syllables have a single under dot within or below the block

25. 00:20:26

    lower the higher versus lower dot is just an aesthetic typesetting difference falling pitch blocks have a tick mark at the upper right lower rising pitch blocks have a tick mark at the lower left and a single dot at the upper right lower high-pitched syllables are marked with double dots at the upper right law and finally across syllables and words there is a scenario that the pitch Rises only to fall again on the next syllable this happens in ethnical for example do you recall that a flagel is the farewell greeting in this case two ticks on the center syllable one at the lower left and another at the upper right on the

26. 00:21:16

    same block show the rise to fall pattern it's important to understand that pitch in Xi'an is not pure tone you'll do better to think of it as the direction in which your voice is moving up or down or not the flow is generally across multiple sounds or syllables as in oddly achill falling pitch is especially rare on short syllables but it does occur even in shun as we've already seen and on chap which means fight or battle keep in mind also that the Shion script on Shion whirls is written almost exclusively vertically from the upper right to the lower left when practicing long words and sentences keep this in mind and try to write it

27. 00:22:05

    that way yourself a single space separates words you can find some examples of numerals and situation on the downloadable document that's it for this lesson in the next chapter we'll be exploring lots of basic words and phrases and if you want to learn to read well practice all of this over and over before moving on yah maniacal study well