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...