On the origin of the Mainstream Hakka word [oi1] “mother”

One of the most common morphemes meaning “mother” in the Hakka dialects is a syllable pronounced [oi1], [ɔi1], or the like. This word, so far as is known, has no phonologically systematic cognates in other Chinese dialect families and is not attested in early Sinographic records. Nor has any plausible non-Sinitic donor language been identified for it. The object of the present paper is to suggest a possible earlier origin for this word. Our hypothesis is that it is in fact a fusion of a Common Neo-Hakka compound *a1 moi1, in which the first element is a kinship prefix and the second is a word whose basic meaning is “mother, aunt, etc.” The paper then suggests that the morpheme *moi1 descends from an even older, pre-Hakka word *moi4, which may in turn have been related in some way to the pre-Hàn word mǔ 母 “mother”.

A Multi-Dimensional Exploration of Future Aspect Marker "Dai" in Chinese Dialect from the Perspective of Typology — Take Gansu Tianzhu Dialect as an Example

Objectives: In Tianzhu dialect, the use of the future aspect marker "Dai[tɛi44]" is frequent. The grammatical meaning of the future aspect marker, "verb phrase (VP) +'Dai[tɛi44]+[lio21]'", in Tianzhu dialect can be divided into two categories according to the differences of VP: one indicates that the end of the action is about to be reached, that is, "VP +'Dai1[tɛi44]+[lio21]'"; the other indicates that the action is about to begin, that is, "VP +‘Dai2[tɛi44]+[lio21]’ ". This article takes the Tianzhu dialect aspect marker "Dai[tɛi44]" as the main research object, and focuses on the grammatical functions and semantic features of "Dai1[tɛi44]" and "Dai2[tɛi44]" by studying the actionality types of verbs in Tianzhu dialect, and compares the future aspect marker "Dai[tɛi44]" in Tianzhu dialect with the future aspect markers of other Chinese dialect in Northwest China, and generalizes the geographical distribution and regional characteristics of the future aspect marker "Dai[tɛi44]".

Analisis Dialek Mandarin Tiongkok Dan Dialek Mandarin Taiwan Dari Film The Ex-File 3 : The Return Of The Exes (Tiongkok) Dan Film Our Times (Taiwan)

Bahasa Mandarin merupakan bahasa dengan penutur terbanyak di dunia, termasuk merupakan bahasa nasional yang digunakan di Taiwan. Meskipun berasal dari sumber yang sama yaitu Beifanghua, namun terdapat perbedaan yang dapat dijumpai diantara keduanya terutama pada aspek fonologi dan leksikal. Untuk itu peneliti melakukan penelitian dengan menggunakan sumber data berupa film untuk membahas perbedaan yang ditemukan dalam film tersebut.Tujuan dari penelitian ini yaitu: (1) Mendeskripsikan perbedaan fonologis dialek Mandarin Tiongkok dan dialek Mandarin Taiwan yang ditemukan di dalam film, (2) Mendeskripsikan perbedaan leksikal dialek Mandarin Tiongkok dan dialek Mandarin Taiwan yang ditemukan di dalam film. Hasil penelitian dari total 85 kosa kata data fonologi yang ditemukan dalam film The Ex-File 3 : The Return Of The Exes (Tiongkok) dan film Our Times (Taiwan) ditemukan perubahan konsonan dan nada yang meliputi konsonan zh [tʂ], ch [tʂ‘], sh [ʂ] dimana dialek Mandarin Taiwan pelafalannya menyerupai konsonan z [ts], c [ts‘] dan s [s], perubahan konsonan r [ʐ] menjadi l [l] dan pengurangan konsonan g [k] pada dialek Mandarin Taiwan, serta perubahan nada dimana dialek Mandarin Tiongkok didominasi oleh nada ringan sedangkan dialek Mandarin Taiwan lebih bervariasi tanpa mengubah arti kata.Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world, including the national language spoken in Taiwan. Even though they come from the same source, namely Beifanghua, there are differences that can be found between the two, especially in the phonological and lexical aspects. For this reason, researchers conducted research using a data source in the form of a film to discuss the differences found in the film.The objectives of this study were: (1) Describing the phonological differences between Mandarin Chinese dialects and Mandarin Taiwanese dialects found in the film, (2) Describing the lexical differences between Mandarin Chinese dialects and Mandarin Taiwanese dialects found in the film. The research results from a total of 85 vocabulary words of phonological data found in The Ex-File 3: The Return of the Exes (China) and Our Times (Taiwan) films found changes in consonants and tones including the consonants zh [tʂ], ch [tʂ '], sh [ʂ] where the Chinese Taiwanese dialect is pronounced like the consonant z [ts], c [ts'] and s [s], changes the consonant r [ʐ] to l [l] and the reduction of the consonant g [k] in the dialect Mandarin Taiwan, as well as the change in tone where the Mandarin Chinese dialect is dominated by light tones while the Mandarin Taiwan dialect is more varied without changing the meaning of the word.

End-to-End Chinese Dialect Discrimination with Self-Attention

Dialect discrimination has an important practical significance for protecting inheritance of dialects. The traditional dialect discrimination methods pay much attention to the underlying acoustic features, and ignore the meaning of the pronunciation itself, resulting in low performance. This paper systematically explores the validity of the pronunciation features of dialect speech composed of phoneme sequence information for dialect discrimination, and designs an end-to-end dialect discrimination model based on the multi-head self-attention mechanism. Specifically, we first adopt the residual convolution neural network and the multihead self-attention mechanism to effectively extract the phoneme sequence features unique to different dialects to compose the novel phonetic features. Then, we perform dialect discrimination based on the extracted phonetic features using the self-attention mechanism and bi-directional long short-term memory networks. The experimental results on the large-scale benchmark 10-way Chinese dialect corpus released by IFLYTEK 1 show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by large margin.

The Foochow Chinese: moving towards a pan-Chinese identity anchored to Mandarin

The study investigated the use of Mandarin and Chinese dialects, and attitudes towards these languages among the Foochow living in Sibu, Sarawak, Malaysia. The study involved 408 Foochow respondents (204 children, 204 parents). As most of the respondents’ close friends, neighbours and colleagues were Foochow, and Chinese in general, Foochow and Mandarin were the two main languages used, but English, Malay and Iban were sometimes used with people from other ethnic groups. More parents felt at ease speaking Foochow in all situations but more children felt that it is nothing special to speak their dialect. The most cherished and emotionally expressive language for the parents was Foochow but for their children, it was Mandarin. More parents were aware of cultural associations and activities than their children. They believed that the use of Chinese dialects will decrease in future and intergenerational transmission of the dialect is important. Yet they were still looking to cultural associations and the government to promote their culture and dialect. The study indicated that the markers for membership of their Chinese dialect group are ancestry, language, living among people from the same dialect group, cultural practices and religion.

Development of Chinese Dialect Bibles

Bible versions in China are classified into five categories: the classical literary (high wenli) version; the simpler literary (easy wenli) version; the Mandarin version; the dialects version; and the national language version. This essay surveys the history and characteristics of the major Chinese dialect Bibles, including many dialects of the following regions: Wu, Min, Gan, Hakka, and Yue. On one hand, the Chinese dialects are necessary for the translation of the Bible and the propagation of Christian faith as well as the liturgical/spiritual life of the church; on the other hand, the Chinese dialect Bibles provide precious information for the synchronic study of every single dialect.