Help talk:IPA/Mandarin/Archive 1

Links
Links to a sound's file should be for sounds that are consistent or that are close enough to the sound described in said article. Also, we shouldn't link to general articles on vowel length, tone, aspiration, or nasalization in the same way we do for phones. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 21:43, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I see, Thank you.
 * See French page for nasalization, aspiration etc.
 * I will try to link the phones in the footnotes later on. 205.228.108.185 (talk) 00:35, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Minor quibble: Isn't the final rather pronounced [ɤŋ]? This fits with a symmetry between the allophones of other back vowels, such as [an]~[ɑŋ]. I'm not sure whether it sounds more like or German though.AlexanderKaras (talk) 03:55, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Template:IPAc-cmn
I created a template to generate IPA from Pinyin. The conversion table could use a look-through—I probably butchered at least one of them. Also, any future changes to the transcription key here need to be modified there. See: Template:tone-cmn, Template:c-cmn, and Template:IPAc-cmn. Thanks! — ˈzɪzɨvə (talk) 05:15, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

many questions...
There are many questions I have here. It would be helpful if there were a list of sources for the values given in these tables. Quite a few of these, such as the "voiced" stops, reflect a very narrow transcription and should be sourced to someone's work. Rgr09 (talk) 12:10, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Why?
Every so often someone thinks they can improve on Pinyin and tries to invent or impose a new system of transliteration. It's not a good idea. How many people are going to bother to learn this system in order to use Wikipedia? Pinyin is easily learnt and many people already know it. It's the standard means of transliteration of Mandarin into the Latin alphabet.

The system in use before was much better; the Chinese script and pinyin were easy to find at the start o the article. Now, if they're there at all, you have to hunt around in boxes and click links to find them.

If you don't want too much information at the start of the article, put the pinyin and characters there, and put the IPA in the infobox with the Wade-Giles and all the other obscure stuff which no-one actually uses in the real world.87.231.185.157 (talk) 09:28, 10 December 2010 (UTC)


 * It's a matter of accessibility. Not everyone knows pinyin, and pinyin doesn't mean the same thing with every language (do you know what ‹bb› or ‹mɡ› mean in pinyin?), whereas the IPA is universal, and should be familiar to anyone who can read a dictionary. Besides, we always use pinyin: it's the IPA that's secondary. — kwami (talk) 09:46, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Minor changes
According to Mandarin phonology, the diphthong written [ou] here is actually, and is. Which is correct?

I would also like a source on these voiced stops if possible. - AlexanderKaras (talk) 06:11, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Whatever we decide, we should make sure that IPAc-cmn correlates with what we put here. That template seems to put tie-bars on affricates and semivowel diacritics for diphthongs when we don't (and shouldn't) have them here. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  06:27, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

call for deletion
Summary: I think that in it's current form, this article stands to do more harm than good, and probably doesn't have a place here anyway. I think it should just be deleted. Problems include:
 * 1. The article poses itself as "the way in which the IPA represents Mandarin in Wikipedia articles," but that's not true, perhaps most importantly because Mandarin is not correctly represented by IPA in articles. It is correctly phonetically represented by pinyin.  See Chinese for more details.
 * 2. I don't think a "sounds sort of like this English word but not really" list is particularly encyclopedic.
 * 2b. Wikibooks has a considerably more useful and complete guide at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Pinyin_Pronunciation
 * 3. Wikipedia already has an IPA equivalency chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin#Zhuyin_vs._Tongyong_Pinyin_.26_Hanyu_Pinyin
 * 4. The system claims to give English equivalents, but falls back to other languages frequently (unavoidably?) when no appropriate English sound is available.
 * 5. There are no sources, and the whole thing looks like just a made up list to me. (This is probably related to point 2.)

I'm sure I could come up with more problems if I took more time, but my point here is not to dog on the article. My point, with all due respect to the authors, is that this article does not belong here and should be deleted. I'm posting here first rather than proposing a delete to see if anyone has any specific reasons it should be kept. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Carychan (talk • contribs) 15:05, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll take your points one-by-one.
 * 1. To say that pinyin is "correct" and Mandarin is "incorrect" is to apply mathematical values to what is really a stylistic difference of opinion. In your opinion, pinyin is better.  However, one of the reasons we supplement pinyin with IPA is because it is not intuitive to our readers.  We're already asking our readers to learn IPA for other languages, we shouldn't ask them to learn another transcription system if we can avoid it.
 * 2. If you have a problem with the examples we've provided, there's nothing inherent about this page that says we can't use the ones you've offered. I don't know why bad examples would be "unencyclopedic."  Maybe they're just bad.
 * 3. That is an article, which is different. We need a place where readers and editors can both understand the IPA conventions for Mandarin to understand/implement them as well as to provide a central location (this talk page) to discuss issues of transcription that come about in one article that may affect others.
 * 4. That is a problem, but, as I said for 2, is easily fixable.
 * 5. Again, this isn't an article, it's a help page of sorts. This may seem like nit-picking, but it's an important distinction as it means that rules about sourcing  are more lax.
 * While you've provided some valuable critique, you haven't demonstrated why this pronunciation guide should be deleted rather than fixed. Maybe looking at WP:DEL will give you some insight on the matter. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]  15:31, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I vote against deletion, a coherent IPA system is important in learning how to pronounce Pinyin correctly. Any article that promotes information about how pinyin should be pronounced is a good idea. Pinyin is not phonemic, it's just a romanisation. And it's really difficult to know how to pronounce pinyin. More Mandarin textbooks, dictionaries and language resources should use the standard phonemic system (IPA) to describe pronunciation. When you are studying any other language, which is written in Latin characters (such as English, Spanish, French or German) you have the IPA pronunciation next to the word written in Latin characters. Also when you are studying Mandarin, you should have the IPA pronunciation next to the pinyin word written in Latin characters.
 * 2b. Wikibooks has a considerably more useful and complete guide at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Pinyin_Pronunciation
 * To my mind, that doesn't seem very useful, except for English speakers...
 * For the reference, I'm not native English speaker, though I've studied it and several other languages quite a lot. I'm a HSK certified level 2 Mandarin speaker so I have some experience, though there's a long way still to go. And I really appreciate all IPA resources to help how to understand and pronounce pinyin. Panu-Kristian Poiksalo (talk) 15:34, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Remove bopomofo?
Recently, bopomofo was added, but it does not represent individual phonemes but entire finals, hence it doesn't seem appropriate here. Should be removed in my opinion. Officer781 (talk) 09:01, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Does that mean that the table at bopomofo is also wrong? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi] 11:40, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It has finals where the pinyin has finals. — kwami (talk) 02:05, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Untitled
I know that is commonly transcribed  or, but I have never heard these pronounced as fricatives, like English Zzzz. That is, Mandarin sì "four" sounds nothing like English says when said quickly enough for the vowel to drop out. Rather, they seem to just be very close vowels: We'd at least need a lowering diacritic in addition to the syllablicity diacritic. A transcription of has the advantage that ri is a rather intuitive  rather than an obscure. kwami (talk) 08:54, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, it really is  or.

Historically, they were actually (about a thousand years ago), but because of some reasons, it was dropped and made consontants that before it syllable.

I don't know if I made it clear.Rethliopuks (talk) 17:36, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

ɤ
Hi, I was directed here from Chang'e 1, which gives the pronunciation as, but the character ɤ is not listed here, only ɤʊ. Not sure which needs correcting... 86.176.215.110 (talk) 10:43, 28 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Sorry, an editor's been changing the templates, but inconsistently so that the IPA is not properly supported. — kwami (talk) 06:33, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

section "p b span"
I have concerns about this line. I think this concern is about the majority of sounds marked as "b" in pinyin. An example is the number 8. In Chinese this is "bā", and is pronounced [pʷa˥] or simply [ba˥] when not fully voiceless by context. The English gloss suggests that to English speakers this is "pa", like the p in "span." But it is not at all, it is very labialized, and rounded, and sounds far more like [b] as in "ban". It is so close to a [b], I would guess that nine out of ten native English speakers would fail to recognize that it is a [p] at all. I suggest a solution like adding a new line:
 * The difference between the p of span and the b of ban is not one of labialization. We would only want to include a line with [pʷ] if we transcribe words with that.  Do we? — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  16:18, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Nasal vowels
I believe there are no real nasal vowel in Mandarin Chinese. "ang", "eng" and "ong" should be [ɑŋ], [əŋ] and [ʊŋ].--2.245.187.63 (talk) 19:29, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

English Approximation
The crucial problem with "English approximation" is that you don't specify what English/American/Australian/Canadian/etc. dialect you use. Senseless in the current way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.2.106.137 (talk) 22:32, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Can you point out the examples where this is a problem? — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 22:37, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Possibly (?) it's referring to "song", which has for North Americans but not e.g. Britons. Lfh (talk) 14:45, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

There can be much improvement for the English approximation part. For example "X" sounds no way like "sh" but it is like the "xi" in taxi. There is a reason why pinyin chose "x" instead of "sh". 1.64.59.37 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:54, 25 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Not sure where you learned Pinyin, but that's false. The use of X for a sh sound probably parallels similar usage in Basque, Galician, Maltese, and Old Spanish.  — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  14:34, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Are the English Approximations something unique to Wikipedia, that is, something that has been provided by the general population, or is there a formal Chinese declaration on these approximations? I ask because, as a native English speaker, I fail to appreciate any difference between the CH in "cheer" versus that in "church" other than the following vowel sounds (ie; tɕʰ|q -vs- tʂʰ|ch). And since this is an apparently important distinction, I would think the approximations ought to reflect this. 118.209.13.254 (talk) 09:45, 12 February 2014 (UTC)


 * There would not be a "formal Chinese declaration" on these approximations. Wisely, I think, government has stayed out of trying to tell, e.g., Basque speakers what sounds in their language are closest to sounds in Chinese.


 * Most people are not aware of the sounds that they make or how they make them. They are aware, instead, of the strange way another person makes "the same" sound in their speech. (I remember as a child frequently speaking with a lady who I now guess came straight from Ireland. Nobody even explained to me that she had an accent. I had to learn to listen to context and intuit what "correct sounds" she, in her strange tongue, was trying to make. I had, initially, no concept of how she produced some of those sounds, nor did it occur to me to try to understand how I made my "correct" sounds.) So the average speak of English is not the best one to describe what sounds in English are the best approximations for sounds in Chinese, and vice-versa. What you really want is a Chinese linguist such as Y.R. Chao (趙元任) who has really good English, or an English-speaking linguist like Jerry Norman who has really good Chinese.


 * Your own comment about "cheer" and "church" is a good example of our not hearing our own speech. I'm not sure where you come from. Maybe you have an old-timer's New Jersey accent, or some other regional variant wherein the two "ch" words are pronounced with the same initial consonant. When I position my tongue as though I'm going to say "cheer" and then try to say "church" I get a very strange sound. If, in school, I had pronounced "church" that way growing up in a town in Nebraska I would have been sent to treatment for my speech defect. I would be saying something that I can try to express in letters as "chee-urch." And if I tried to use the "ch" tongue preparation for "church" to say "cheer" it would turn into something coming from way back in my mouth and would sound more like "charch." That reminds me that I once knew a guy from Missouri who always talked about "jockey sharts," "boxer sharts," and so forth. He may have been making his "sh" sounds more like the Chinese retroflex "sh" sound. Too bad I didn't interrogate him at the time.


 * The use of English approximations is certainly not a "best practices" sort of thing. The "ch" of "cheer" is not the Chinese "q" sound. The tip of the tongue is in significantly different places for the two sounds, up in the airflow for English, and raising no turmoil for Chinese.




 * See [this site] for more discussion of what the tongue is actually doing for the "q" sound.P0M (talk) 16:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

v
Is [v] standard? Because even news anchors do that.--2.245.139.149 (talk) 23:07, 19 September 2013 (UTC)


 * No. It's a recent "import" from other regional Chinese "dialects." It may become permanent, or it may disappear when it goes out of vogue. (Do you remember when a radio announcer from GB introduced a form of English pronunciation wherein "s" such as the initial consonant in "sob" were all turned into "sh" sounds? I think the practice even extended to sentences such as, "I usually sit on the davenport." Thank goodness that fad self-extinguished. Who knows what will happen to "v" in Mandarin. I once had a philosophy teacher in Taiwan who was from somewhere in Zhejiang. He spoke of "物理學 vǔ lì xioh*" (with xioh in 入聲）. It didn't bother my Chinese schoolmaets. They acted as though they didn't notice his pronunciation even when he referred to "thinkers" as 死像家, which seemed riotously funny to me. Nobody else even cracked a smile. The thing about Northern Chinese is that lots of people like my old teacher moved around, especially (I suspect) in the Great Cultural Revolution. Maybe the ones who ended up in the north had high status? For some reason their "new speech" attracted many converts for "v." P0M (talk) 16:56, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Questionable values
The word 安 does not sound like the English word "an", so the vowel should not be represented by [a]. [ɐ] would be better.
 * English "an" isn't represented by [an] but [æn].--2.245.205.168 (talk) 18:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The difference between [a] and [æ] is that [a] is "open" and "[æ]" is halfway to "open-mid", so the difference between the two is very slight. [ɐ] is "open-mid" and central, so it isn't quite like [a] either. A small region in the U.S. uses [a], and the discussion at Open_front_unrounded_vowel along with the pronunciation sample at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

give something very different from the Chinese sound.

ʊ in, e.g., 東 tʊŋ is explained as sounding like the "oo" in "hook," but "oo" is a little too rounded. Maybe there is no better choice.

I don't see the [ɯʌ] (or just [ʌ]) needed to give the pronunciation for 德.


 * Where did you read that? It's [ɤ].--2.245.205.168 (talk) 18:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
 * What makes you an expert? Seriously, I am not asking a rhetorical question.
 * Check http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/phonlab/ipatut/index.html and use "voice" IPA2.
 * Check Close-mid_back_unrounded_vowel and hit the play button in the taxo box there.
 * I can't find any English words that are transcribed with [ɤ].

An example is given for [ʌ] in footnote 1o for "some value [ˌsʌɱˈvæɫjuː])" in International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects, and it certainly sounds better than your choice.

I don't see the [ɪ] needed to give the pronunciation for 民 ［mɪn]. (It is not pronounced like the English word "mean" unless someone is hyper-correcting and trying to work out the sound s/he should be producing to correspond to the dictionary's "min".


 * Again, English "mean" isn't [mcn] but [iː].--2.245.205.168 (talk) 18:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)


 * You misunderstand. The Chinese 民 is being transcribed as [mi:n], but Chinese people don't pronounce it that way unless they are over-correcting because of pinyin transcriptions. 一 yi but 民 min. The two "i" sounds are different. [ɪ] is the sound in 民 and in English kit, lid, fill, bin.


 * The article on pinyin that provides IPA equivalents for various pinyin "spellings" offers

yin 	bin 	pin 	min 	nin 	lin 	jin 	qin 	xin

Those IPA values ought to produce pronunciations that would sound like the vowels in English: Een 	bean 	peen 	mean 	neam [oil] 	lean 	jean  cheap sheen ball and peen hammer The vocal tract needs to be more relaxed, as with [ɪ]

(additions above to bring discussion forward) 01:27, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

/x/
From what I've heard from Mandarin pronunciation words syllables that start with "h" (Pinyin) don't seem all that velar. At the very least it's an /x/ that is audibly different from, say, German or Russian. And certainly very different from "loch" (as given in the table).

At the very least, it seems to be pronounced quite differently in "han" than in "hu" or "he". Does anyone have a detailed, reliable phonology source regarding /x/ in Mandarin?

Peter Isotalo 00:03, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'll be cleaning up that page. It's not like "loch" because "loch" has is much harsher like [χ] instead of [x]. But in broad transcription, it doesn't make any difference. The standard pronunciation for pinyin "h" is [x]. This is especially prevalent in the North where the newsanchor pronunciation comes from. In the South it might be less harsh and reduced to [h] because of the influence of Wu and Cantonese. As you've mentioned it can also depend on the vowel following pinyin "h". But [x] is generally correct. --2.245.117.253 (talk) 18:21, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

English Approximation for tʂ, tʂʰ, ʂ, ʐ
Is there any reference or citation? I am Native Mandarin speaker, and for these four sounds, I don't really think there is any English Approximation for tʂ, tʂʰ and ʂ.

By far, there is only Russian Approximations: Ш for ʂ and Ж for ʐ; in addition, ʐ sometimes does has English Approximation "Raw" when combined with certain vowels.

As for examples,


 * tʂ is not roughly like "jaw" [dʒɔ], which is similar to edgy [ɛdʒɪ], more like tɕ (without -r sound), which is totally different from tʂ (with -r sound).

Like wise,


 * tʂʰ is not roughly like "church" [tʃɝtʃ], which is similar to cheat [[tʃit], more like tɕʰ (without -r sound), which is totally different from tʂʰ (with -r sound).
 * ʂ is not roughly like "show" [ʃo], which is similar to she [[ʃi], more like ɕ (without -r sound), which is totally different from ʂ (with -r sound).

They are not "roughly like" but totally different.

I suggest we should mark tʂ, tʂʰ, ʂ with [No English equivalent] like some entries in Help:IPA for French.

-- TX55   TALK  16:09, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Possible mistakes
In the table it reads
 * tɕ j roughly like edgy
 * tɕʰ q roughly like cheat
 * ɕ x roughly like she.

Shouldn't these be
 * tɕ j roughly like edgy
 * tɕʰ q roughly like cheat
 * ɕ x roughly like she?

K9re11 (talk) 13:14, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

retroflex
I'm a native speaker grown up with German. When I pronounce sounds like pinyin sh/ch, they just sound like the English sh/ch or German sch/tsch. I never knew there was a difference before I got to know IPA. If I really pronounce them retroflexly, it sounds exaggerated as if I had a strong Northern dialect which isn't standard Mandarin anymore.--77.0.240.233 (talk) 21:44, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Mandarin retroflexes are laminal, so they're not retroflex in the 'true' sense. The difference ought to be that they're not palatalised, whereas German and English sh/ch/etc. are somewhat palatalised. — Lfdder (talk) 22:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, German postalveolars often sound just like the Polish ones, i.e. are laminal retroflex. Peter238 (talk) 11:51, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Removed three vowels not produced by the template
Also reduced the entries to sequences that produce the phones in question. — kwami (talk) 22:15, 28 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I understand I made and removed a complaint yesterday about the over-precision of a. However, it seems this is standard practice in chinese phonology writings and my edits were reverted at the standard chinese phonology article as well. Hence I have reverted the removals.--Officer781 (talk) 02:53, 29 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm for removing from this guide, but not from Standard Chinese phonology. We don't have to list every single allophone here. That seems to be the general policy for the IPA guides (but not phonologies), and that's how it is on Help:IPA for Russian, where the open vowel  is transcribed, rather than , the mid vowels are written  instead of  (even though both close-mid  and mid  occur as allophones of ), and many allophones  are simply not listed. The same kind of simplification applies to Russian consonants. Peter238 (talk) 11:40, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Removed them again. They're not generated by the template, so it is incorrect to include them here. — kwami (talk) 04:37, 30 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Changed the generic a to a central vowel. I'm not sure how the template works for "generated" but I'd suggest sticking to an external source on transcribing the sounds (in this case using the generic IPA symbol for central "a" as the underlying phoneme as how the standard mandarin phonology books and papers out there do it).--Officer781 (talk) 14:11, 30 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I wonder about the recent changes. I've never heard ei or ou pronounced with a mid-central vowel, at least not that I've noticed. — kwami (talk) 04:24, 31 July 2015 (UTC)


 * It's a rough transcription that's in the literature that uses the underlying vowel to transcribe (otherwise we would have too many sounds to use here with four variants of a). For example, English [ʌ] is almost never pronounced this way anymore by nearly every variant including GA and RP (pronounced as [ɐ] instead), but is retained for various purposes. I feel WP's IPA pages should be used more as a rough guide on how to pronounce rather than an "exact" pronunciation which would be covered in the phonology page instead. Since Wikipedia seems to mainly use Duanmu (2007), it's in the appendix. See the link I gave you on your talk page.--Officer781 (talk) 13:35, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

"May be pronounced with a light frication"
I just noticed that Officer781 reverted regarding the note "May be pronounced with a light frication". This does not seem useful for the purposes of this page: This page is a HELP page designed to help readers pronounce Mandarin, as a simpler alternative to Standard Chinese phonology. What benefit could there possibly be in discussing phonological variations that none of the intended audience needs to worry about? &mdash; Sebastian 19:26, 19 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Ok, removed the note.--Officer781 (talk) 02:25, 20 December 2015 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Help talk:IPA which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 16:17, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

ɨ́
Where do I find the ɨ́ in the table of the article...? E.g.: [wǎŋ ɕí.ʈʂɨ́] in an english docu this is pronounced like german ö ...? Thanx! --HilmarHansWerner (talk) 16:29, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Tie bars
[t͡ɕ], [t͡ɕʰ], [ʈ͡ʂ] and [ʈ͡ʂʰ] are with tie bars but [ts] and [tsʰ] are without them. Should they be consistent? In Template:IPAc-cmn, transcriptions for the six affricates are all left out tie bars. LoveVanPersie (talk) 23:19, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

I have removed tie bars on the help page. LoveVanPersie (talk) 18:18, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

zhi, chi, shi, zi, ci, si, ri
The article Close_back_unrounded_vowel says it's ɯ instead of ɨ.--77.0.233.136 (talk) 19:13, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

zi, ci, si have [ɯ], while zhi, chi, ri have [ɨ] -iopq (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Tone marks
Can we just use the modern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_letter#Chao_tone_letters_(IPA) because the current template is completely incomprehensible to me -iopq (talk) 22:57, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

[o]: wo/-uo
Isn't this plain wrong ? [o]: wo/-uo- Maybe what's meant is rather /o/. --Backinstadiums (talk) 07:46, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

ɔ
This sound is referred to in the article on general tso. Yet, I can't find it referenced here! It would be great if someone could figure that out, either adding the missing sound to this page, or changing the pronunciation guide for general tso (the general). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.6.212.104 (talk) 03:38, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree that the o sound in Pinyin is ALWAYS pronounced as /ɔ/, and never as /o/. This is simply a mistranscription, in my opinion, and should be fixed. 148.74.122.57 (talk) 15:47, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

ɚ
based on sound file English approximation should be after not far http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/English_Phonetics/vowel_er.html--Dicey2020 (talk) 13:56, 11 December 2019 (UTC)Dicey2020
 * This guide now has two different IPA renderings for er, 二，兒/儿. There should be only one.  Kanguole 10:05, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

ɻ̩: "somewhat like sir"
British or American? WP Ludicer (talk) 02:53, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * In a General American accent. — Note that rhotic accents do exist in the UK, as well as non-rhotic ones in the US, so don't describe this as a British vs. American matter. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 03:23, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Are there rhotic accents spoken in the British Isles that realize the NURSE vowel as a syllabic approximant? I don't think it hurts to qualify the variety and say "somewhat like American sir", which I'm sure most readers will construe as referring to an R-colored vowel. Nardog (talk) 04:33, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Good point. and  actually realize different rhymes in Standard Mandarin — the former is also a frequent result of erhua, which is completely neglected on this help page. "Somewhat like American sir" is perhaps the best English approximation that a majority of users understand, though that wording will not lead to an easily comprehensible, unambiguous pronunciation in all cases. Or should we write sir or err, in order to prevent a pronunciation with a schwa-y vowel? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 05:38, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Err is often pronounced in American English. I don't know what's wrong with using sir. Nardog (talk) 09:46, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Maybe let's use RP furry (which isn't r-colored) for the former and GA fur for the latter? Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 10:50, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure. Ideally, users should differentiate between the rhymes, , , and perhaps also  , though the difference between the latter two is by no means essential and only maintained by a minority of Mandarin speakers. (Very careful or dialect speakers may use V+ sequences instead of rhotacized V. — In article Erhua, rhoticized  and  are written  and  , a not-really-IPA transcription that is probably due to poor font support of the rhotacized diacritic.) To me it seems quite unacceptable to say that English far is similar to , as we currently do. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 13:54, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * This suggests that RP furry for, GA fur for and starring for  could be the best choice. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 14:14, 9 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, we could do that. This means we add r-coloured vowels that are the result of erhua, doesn't it? And if so: Should we use non-standard symbols as in Erhua, or standard symbols as in zh:兒化音 (with frequent use of unsyllabic ) or in fr:Suffixe -er (with the IPA rhotacized diacritic modifying the vowel that constitutes the syllable nucleus throughout)? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:43, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

I've never heard anyone pronounce initial  as [ɻ]. It's always fricative, even if sometimes rather light. Where is this from? — kwami (talk) 03:31, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I now notice a) that this help page uses ⟨ɻ⟩ for inital rather than for rhotacized finals, and b) that consequently user:WP Ludicer may have referred to ⟨ɻ⟩ for initial  in the title. — I agree that  is the usual pronunciation of initial, and that  is not recommendable for Standard Mandarin. Which means that our current recommendation is plain wrong. And so is the footnote ("Also transcribed as  in older literature."), because it erroneously suggests that current authors no longer use the symbol ⟨ʐ⟩. — Please note that the topic of this discussion is a) erhua and b) the rhyme of shi, zhi, chi, rather than initial . Wherever the symbol ⟨ɻ⟩ is used without the diacritic for syllabicity, a preceding vowel is mentioned—except for the title. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 04:03, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Removal of duplicate footnote and documentation, Revision of description of [ts]
1., can't we remove one of the footnotes around [b]cheap[b] -- why does it need to have both pointing to the same note?

2. Why do we need to write (aspiration) in parens after describing it as "with a breath of air" and also linking out the aspiration page?

3. Most importantly, why would we expect the average reader of English to know how to pronounce/read "Greek τσ, as in τσάι", regardless of if it's accurate? Isn't the goal to give the Anglophone an idea of how these sounds might be approximated in English? With this description, we're not only requiring the reader have a familiarity with Greek phonology, but also that they can read the Greek Alphabet. Maybe "kids" isn't the best approximation, but it's more intuitive than Greek. Let me know why you believe the Greek should be maintained.

Estherliebowitz (talk) 15:15, 17 July 2020 (UTC)


 * 1. The footnote in front of cheap is an obvious mistake and should be removed.
 * 2. I am not sure if the wording "strong burst of breath" is correct when we talk about affricates, as the burst, or release of the stop element, is not immediately followed by breath/aspiration, but by an intervening fricative element.
 * 3. I agree that Greek isn't helpful. We could use kids as an approximation and add a note that the Mandarin sound is fully voiceless, or use something like outset, which doesn't require further explanation and is prevocalic like the Mandarin affricate. And I believe that unaspirated word-final cats for is a bad illustration and ought to be replaced with something like let's help. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:24, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Consonants sorting order ?
Is there a raison for this specific order ? From what I understand, it would be more logical : OR But the current order is a mix between 2 logics and makes little sense. Do I miss something ? Yug (talk)  14:31, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * to move :
 * ʂ right before ʈʂ, ʈʂʰ ;
 * ɕ right before tɕ, tɕʰ.
 * to have therefor :
 * s right before t, tʰ.
 * to group s, ʂ, ɕ.


 * Our IPA help pages usually follow the order used in Table 3 on pp. 166–171 of the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ("pseudo-alphabetical order by symbol shape"). This means that the consonants should be reordered as follows: ⟨ɕ f ɥ j k kʰ l m n ŋ p pʰ ɻ s ʂ t tʰ tɕ tɕʰ ts tsʰ ʈʂ ʈʂʰ w x⟩, and the monophthongal vowels as ⟨a e ə ɚ ɛ~æ ɤ i o ɹ̩ ɻ̩ u ʊ y⟩. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:05, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

tɕ's english pronunciation
Current : Suggestion : I may be unwillingly biased, but I think it would be more accurate to suggest : Yug (talk)  14:40, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * tɕ	j	ch	ㄐ	叫 cheap
 * tɕ	j	ch	ㄐ	叫 Jeep, Jeans, Djinn


 * The problem is that Mandarin has an aspirated–unaspiated contrast for affricates (and plosives), which in syllables that aren't completely unstressed are always voiceless, whereas English has a fortis–lenis contrast with voiceless vs. voiced segments, esp. when surrounded by vowels and resonants. I agree that the affricate in cheap may be somewhat aspirated when stressed, so this is not an ideal choice. On the other hand inital obstruents in English are often more or less devoiced. Before deciding on a this change which affects all affricates and plosives, I'd like to have this commented by other users, e.g., , . Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:33, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

English plosives tend to be devoiced in initial position, but that's not true for affricate 'j'. "Jeep" is quite voiced, at least in my accent. Affricates also don't occur after 's', so that option's out. What might work is a d-sh sequence in a compound word, like broadsheet, though that would have the problem that it's no longer an affricate. I doubt there's a good solution. — kwami (talk) 13:20, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with kwami. Double sharp (talk) 09:03, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

“[ɨ]”
What happen about “[ɨ]” sound? Juidzi (talk) 02:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
 * That's a different analysis. The analysis adopted here takes zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci, si to be syllabic consonants. (See zh:空韵.) Double sharp (talk) 09:46, 28 August 2021 (UTC)