sitting with my ear to the speaker

[kaigou]

(If only there were a way to slow down the audio and still have it comprehensible. I could use that.)

When a Mandarin-speaker answers the phone, the greeting sounds like wei. Okay. (Not that we were taught that, either, but some things I did pick up from friends.) A number of times in the Taiwanese dramas, a character will greet another, or respond, in a way that sounds a lot like the different ways an English-speaker would say, "hey" -- and it has the same sound as the phone-greeting wei. So, someone's down on themselves, and the friend says, wei, to get their attention, and then, a quick-cajoling wei, wei, wei the same way I might say "hey, hey [stop that]" in English. Unfortunately, the subtitles never show this mid-conversation, non-phone-use wei as a character on the screen.

Is this the same hanzi, or just one that sounds a lot like the phone-greeting? (Or alternately, one that only sounds similar if it's a Taiwanese accent?)

many thanks in advance for helping me out of the bafflement.

Comments

[tesserae]

I threw the question over to a former student who's from Taiwan; I'll let you know what she says...

[tesserae]

Former student sez: "This is quite an interesting question. I have never think about it this way before when i speak! ^^

Your friend got it all correct the ways we use wei!
Wei is indeed the "Hello" when we pick up the phone, and also used like "hey" in English. And when it used three times in a quick-cajoling wei, wei, wei is the same as hey, hey, hey to get someones attention. And it acts just like interjection in English, and use the same Chinese character 喂 in all situation. We don't normally have it in formal written Chinese but might be able to see it in novels or informal written works.

I don't know much about Chinese Mandarin in mainland China, but I don't think it is the Taiwanese accent. Although, Taiwanese do tend to use a lot of expletive words at the end of a sentence, more so than Chinese Mandarin speakers I have noticed. It is quite often that a few words sound will be left out from the subtitles because it doesn't really help in the sentence structure but simply used as the utterance of a word or phrase that express some kind of emotion into it, depends on the tone used."

Hope this is helpful!

[kaigou]

Very helpful!

Actually, tell your friend that s/he pegged something else that'd been making me curious, which was the number of emphasis-characters at the end of sentences. There's one for almost every sentence, which startles me sometimes because my (PRC) friends don't use those emphasis-sounds (like the varying types of question-sounds, beyond just ma and ba) nearly as much. But the Taiwanese pronunciation is really really soft on those sounds, all the same, so it's almost like an aspiration at the end instead of a very pronounced ma! that I've heard in PRC/mainland voices.

Where the Taiwanese pronunciation seems to go really soft (almost not-there-at-all) is in le, the past-tense indicator. The subtitles will clearly have 了 in there, yet listening carefully indicates no le-sound at all. It's like it's completely dropped (and clear, I guess, by context) yet the subtitles add it back in. Or is it just really aspirated? Or maybe pronounced a little differently, enough that I'm mistaking it for something else?

Sometimes I wonder, when comparing what-I-hear with the subtitles, whether someone isn't "adjusting" the subtitles for Proper Chinese Grammar or whatnot. Given that some of the dramas also include snippets of commercials from the breaks (bad editing, I suppose), and getting to hear some of the voiceovers on those commercials... oh, my ears burn from the strong Beijing accent, so I'd bet at least a few of those dramas are fansubbing copies made from overseas/PRC broadcasts (but the subtitles are still in traditional, so, color me confused, since I thought PRC was almost obsessive about simplified as a political statement). Anyway, just makes me wonder whether Taiwanese phrasing adds emphatics on the end but drops things like 了 where it's obvious or can be inferred.

(Incidentally, the subtitles are all very good about adding hanzi for what is there, like the end-sounds... it's just that I'm not sure whether they're adding more on top of that.)

anyway, tell your friend I send a big thank-you for the explanation! XD

[margrave]

Hey! Hope you don't mind me butting in, was going through friends reading list and stumbled upon your account, and your adventures in language is absolutely fascinating.

Your question regarding ‘wei’ is really interesting and it is something I have never thought of in detail. I had to call up my dad to confirm the usage of ‘wei’ PRC (I trust his complete PRC education life as opposed to my cheese grater PRC education). From a PRC point of view the only time I use 'wei' is when I'm answering the phone, and when I want to get somebody's attention. It is like going, 'Hey! Over here!' type of thing (and only if I know them well, because it is a bit rude to go, 'wei') and I would use it very sparingly. In short, no, it isn't common in PRC day-to-day usage beyond answering the phone.

In regards to subtitles - surprisingly there is rarely any adjustments to them when shown in PRC. The additional words at the end of sentences (or lack of) for Taiwanese speakers don’t make much of ping on most PRC natives’ radar. I was talking to dad about this and he was completely nonplussed about the whole thing because it was like, ‘why would it matter?’ with or without the subtitles it would still mean the same thing. It was -, um, an interesting conversation on the great divide between native speakers and people who have to learn it from scratch. Which I suppose really doesn’t answer your question about the pronunciation of ‘le’. The other thing I was reminded by dad was the fact that the subtitles could have been taken directly from the script, and the dialogue would be what the actors decided would be most suitable for the scene/character.

Also, I’m not sure about Taiwanese television networks, but ALL shows, whether, reality tv, game shows, news, dramas, etc., they are all subtitled in PRC. I mean every, single show on ever single PRC network. I’m pretty sure the Chinese New Year Celebration gets subtitled too (the thing is, it is so PREVALENT and always there that after while you stop noticing).

Taiwanese Mandarin pronunciation makes my ears tired because it always sounds as if they are slurring and not pronouncing words clearly. It takes me at least 10 mins before my ears adjust to Taiwanese pronunciation and even then there will be times when certain actors just make it unbearably difficult to understand.

So, um, I hope that helped.

[kaigou]

Always welcome! I'm a perpetual student, so any insight/tips/instructions and/or buckets of ice water to dunk my head in -- it's all welcome. I might even learn something, eventually. Or at least get it to stick -- I swear, for every new hanzi learned, three others fall out of my head. Last week I forgot how to spell a technical word but suddenly could remember exactly the verb ending for the future perfect plural-second-person in French. Oi.

Anyway: a cheese-grater education! Sorry, that cracks me up. (CP's comment: "the person has been horribly scarred by the educational system?")

In re subtitles: there has to be some kind of a political statement going on in there, then, because all the Taiwanese shows I've seen so far have traditional hanzi, not the PRC-simplified. I'd think if PRC had any say in it, they'd want simplified on the screen (if nothing else, to help promote increased literacy of the hanzi actually in use in the viewers' daily PRC-lives).

Come to think of it, we sort of have the same thing (as 'wei' or 'moshimoshi'), if looser, in English, in that we might answer a greeting with "speaking," which is something we'd never say in person. Hrmm.

...the subtitles could have been taken directly from the script, and the dialogue would be what the actors decided would be most suitable for the scene/character.

That makes sense -- if the slang/colloquial is to diminish certain sounds to a degree they're barely inflected, it might still be in the script (to let the actors know). Maybe like the way in English we would write "driving" but in actual pronunciation it's more like "dry-ven" with no -g at all.

A'course, it doesn't help that some of the dramas I've been finding have gone through what looks like four generations of VHS followed by squeezing into .rmvb format and then converted into avi -- the sound is so freaking muddy the shows could be dubbed in Swedish and I wouldn't have a clue. I can't make out anything at all, and with the oh-so-helpful english fansubbers sticking hard-coded subtitles RIGHT ON TOP of the characters -- and then having chunks where the hanzi underneath are changing, the person's talking an awful long time, and the visible text only says "I'm so glad you haven't forgotten" and I'm like, DON'T TRY TO FOOL ME. I know the person is saying a lot more than that! (How can you not translate it? the script is RIGHT THERE on the screen!)

*heddesk*

The pronunciation doesn't annoy me... it just confuses me, over whether that's an actual word and the error is mine (for not remembering) or if it's just a different pronunciation. Cruel to do, to the student! Frankly, it'd probably be easier on me to just watch Mainland dramas, except for the fact that the Beijing accent makes my skin crawl. All those rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr's at the end of everything. Fffftt!

Hmm. Know any good Shanghaiese-inflected dramas? I keep coming across recs for "The Longest Night in Shanghai", but otherwise the most common fansubbed mainland works appear to be wuxia, and I can only take so many people flying through the air before I start wishing for a solid police procedural. Heh.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry for butting in, especially as it seems you already have a Taiwanese and a PRC contributing to this conversation. I just wanted to add that for me (I'm a native Chinese speaker as well), though the same hanzi is used, I would never pronounce the word the same way in both cases. In answering the phone, I'd use second tone, whereas if I'm getting someone's attention, I'd use fourth tone. It's not interchangeable, for me. I don't know if that's the experience for anyone else, but I would expect it to be so...?

[kaigou]

Always the more the merrier, when it comes to learning. Not being raised with a tonal language, it's the hardest part of any Chinese dialect, for me. (I had classmates who complained about the number of characters we had to learn, and yeah, memorizing that many is hard, but hearing tones was much harder.) Taiwanese dramas don't help, really, because they seem to drop or barely inflect tones -- their third tone in particular. If I didn't have characters on the screen that I associate with 'third-tone', I probably wouldn't know it from what I'm hearing.

But like you can see, no one's mentioned a tone-differential in how one uses 'wei', so I'd say it's a good point. My understanding is that tones are not interchangeable -- or, they're not supposed to be -- so it should make a difference. I'll definitely be listening more closely to the use, in the future. Thank you for pointing it out!

(Although the goal isn't really to be able to speak, at this point. There's no one this planet I dislike so much that I'd subject them to my horrendous accent when it comes to speaking Mandarin... you know it's a sign when you repeat a sentence in class and your professor just kind of winces, shakes his head, pauses, and then tries to make up for his reaction by saying, "but you have the prettiest handwriting in the class!" When we go visit, I expect I'll just be writing down all my replies... eheh.)