Miscellaneous notes on phonology of Yunnan dialect

There is such a joke circulating in the red river area. A Hani villager complained: "Last year, I wanted a son and daughter-in-law, and B was swollen once. This year, I married a girl, and B expanded again. I didn't eat any food. I went to the mountains to collect some firewood to sell, and the machine Bobby was worn out. " The listener was shocked at first and thought he was swearing, but he knew that he was speaking a very common language of life.

Most ethnic minorities in Yunnan have their own mother tongue, and Chinese is their foreign language. Naturally, many syllables are difficult to pronounce. All nasal nng in Chinese is basically omitted, so "Jianbang" is called Jiba and Bei is called (B). Others describe basketball as the sun, red flag as the brown flag, program as Gary, going home as Hu Jia and so on.

Another situation of minority pronunciation is to omit the difficult pronunciation such as ea in Chinese. Visiting Dounan Flower Market, I asked the florist the name of a plant. People in flower shops call it "lifting trees", but I can't hear you clearly. I don't know what lifting a tree is. It turned out that the florist changed the word "iron" to "titanium" and the word "iron tree" to "lift the tree". As a native of Yunnan, I'm afraid everyone can understand this pronunciation. There are many such examples, such as "advanced" as "new", "reunion" as "hoarding", "Jin Xian" as "people-friendly" and so on.

It is worth mentioning that many Han people in Yunnan pronounce it like this.

The Han nationality living in Yunnan, whose ancestors were all northerners, should have spoken a very standard northern dialect when they first arrived. However, due to the long-term coexistence with ethnic minorities, it was unconsciously assimilated into the language of ethnic minorities. Even Kunming people can hardly distinguish the postnasal sound G when they pronounce it. Many people can't distinguish the pronunciation of "min" and "Ming", "pro" and "light", "soup" and "pool", "mountain" and "Aang", which leads to a lot of writing.

There is another situation, that is, all the initials zhichishir are pronounced as tooth zcs (? ), for example, say "eat" as "grow rice". Why do you call "teacher" old teacher, "mountain" three mourning, "sleep" old feeling and so on? I think this may be because there is no such epigram as "knowing the red stone" in our ancient Chinese, but there is one in Putonghua based on the northern dialect. Because northerners are influenced by foreigners (foreigners (such as Turkic) have these initials in their pronunciation, and the influence of foreigners on the Chinese nation is gradually from north to south), they gradually add these finals. And influenced by the southern minorities, Yunnan people kept this ancient pronunciation form. By the way, this pronunciation method is generally the same throughout southern China. After listening carefully to Taiwan Province people speak Mandarin, the tongue is still not obvious.

It is the Hui people who can pronounce these sounds well in Yunnan, probably because they have studied and used Arabic for a long time. Gao Jiawen has many rhymes similar to Zhi Zhi's Poems.

Of course, this situation refers to the older generation of Han people in Yunnan. For young people, young people who grew up under the influence of Mandarin as soon as they entered school, I don't think there will be such a mistake.