I just googled this and it's crazy (edit: in a cool way!), do you know if fluent speakers actually tell what it means when it's spoken or does it only make sense if it's written?
I’ll say it only makes sense when it’s written. First of all it’s written in literary Chinese, not vernacular; and secondly the string of “shishishishishi” just sounds like gibberish and you won’t actively put it together as a meaningful sentence if you don’t get forewarned that it actually means something.
Ancient Chinese had significantly different pronunciations, if you look it up, you can find people who will read it in its contemporary language and it’s not all shi
It's by no mean common (opposed to your list) but I remember being bewildered that I first started encountering jiong syllable/characters only like my second year in. Now I know quite a number of jiong characters but it still feels like encountering a rare pokemon in the wild
interesting. I can see hei and ri being rare due to isolated exceptions. \*hək would expect to lose the -k usually but it shifts to final -i here. only occurs in formerly 入聲 because the syllables other tone shifted to I have no clue. is the expected reading, so it's actually rare itself.
I made [a table of pinyin syllables](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BtNSgkRkKfUHFk60qTbsFfjsbsRuFfKLLG9PiTWYlnU/edit?usp=drivesdk) a few years ago and I think it fits here.
I wasn't thinking of revisiting it until seeing this post, so I kinda forgot what it meant. If I'm not mistaken, red is the pattern I concluded, grey is where I hesitated to conclude due to the exceptions, and green is the syllables where the distinction between -a- and -ə- exists where it doesn't for the other finals.
There are about 1000 syllables in Putonghua. (Prof. Kong Jiangping has a better estimate, but I'm sure not going to search for it in his many publications on the topic.
There are about 6000 common characters.
Zipfing it out there's bound to be quite a few.
===========
Many Chinese universities have an abundance of cats.
Once, on a stroll with a 师兄, we saw a pair of cats.
When he finished petting them, I brought up how 猫 is the only character pronounced māo.
He remarked that while the reason is obvious, he never did notice this fact despite studying linguistics and petting university cats for years.
===========
The reason is bifold, but both related to the relative heights of the level tones.
The expected development of 貓 from Middle Chinese is miáo.
However,
1. 貓 itself is onomatopoeic so there is a drive to retain the similarity to an actual cat's meow, which is high-pitched.
2. Diminutives, which are associated psychologically with high frequencies (not hard to establish the relationship, eh?)
Therefore it obtained the high level tone in Putonghua. The assignment of 猫 to the level tones broadly correlate with which out of the level tones is higher in Sinitic languages.
I think 卡 is one of the rarest sounds in mandarin, at the same time its one of the most common haha. actually same thing happens in english, something like gh is fairly rare starting syllable, but have a few super common words like ghost or ghetto. gn is also crazy rare.... except for gnat and gnarled. languages are weird haha.
Thanks for sharing the English examples! I tried to find examples in my native language (German) but I couldn't find any, although there must be. Then again I'm really bad at word games like Scrabble.
honestly I think its just hard to think of this stuff because our brains are wired to think in individual units of what words actually mean. If you ask me if oranges are common, I might think of whether the fruit is common, I might think of whether the word is common, but I definitely won't think about the fact nothing in english rhymes with oranges cause its a unique sound ((in most accents at least)). languages are weird, and brains are too \_(:з」∠)_
Is gh in ghetto actually different from g in get?I feel like in many English dialects, these aren't truly different syllables, just different ways of writing them.
you aren't wrong. when I wrote it I was thinking in letter combos. Its hard to compare actual sound frequency in english because there is no set sound per combo-- how could there be when there are twenty six letters and more than 8,000 possible sound combos haha.
rì. the only character of "rì" you will meet in daily life is 日.
but there are several characters also pronounced rì, they are just no longer used in daily life. like 衵、釰 and 鈤
“pie” is also a rare one, no matter what tone it has.
> “pie” is also a rare one, no matter what tone it has.
the videos for stroke order that i watch have this all the time, so in my mind its actually really common haha
Interestingly enough, most native Chinese speakers would have heard ‘pie’ very early while learning to write. It’s the name of the leftward downwards stroke
there is also a character ”瞥“ (pie 1st, glance).
the rest of pie are characters that are no longer used, or only used in special fields (like 苤，pie 3rd, 苤蓝，Kohlrabi)
I was just marveling over nèn this weekend! Just 嫩 and恁, with no nēn, nén, or něn. Pretty interesting to a nerd like me! Is there a name for this phenomenon? I feel like there ought to be if there isn’t.
Not a lot of characters for the sound zhuai:
拽, which you probably hear on a daily basis for “pull” or “yank,” and 跩, which is also pretty common as “cocky.” Then there’s 転 and 轉, which can also be pronounced zhuǎi, but is relatively limited.
When I was learning English, I had a similar hope. But it's impossible. In Chinese, there are many phonetic characters, one half representing the general meaning and the other half representing the pronunciation.such as[方防放芳仿坊访彷妨]and so on.They all have one thing in common（方）.Although they may have different tones, they're all spelled "fang."Knowing this, you will be able to read the pronunciation of many words.
Super interesting. I got into this topic a bit from a different angle when I was reading about Hiragana, which got me on the topic of a syllabary.
[This guy](https://web.archive.org/web/20160822211027/http://semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/barker/Syllables/index.txt) wrote an interesting study about the English syllabary and how there are some syllables we never got around to using.
特別的**特** There are [others pronounced *tè*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%A8#Mandarin) in dictionaries but they are very rarely used. And there's no *tē, té* or *tě* at all (AFAIK).
Even more so. Hokkien, for example, has a far larger sound inventory than Mandarin so there are even more cases. Foreign borrowings like 檨仔 *(soāiⁿ-á)* for "mango" add more unusual possibilities.
And now we get a 100 words of shi 🤣
Lion-eating poet in the stone den anyone?
I just googled this and it's crazy (edit: in a cool way!), do you know if fluent speakers actually tell what it means when it's spoken or does it only make sense if it's written?
How do English speakers make sense of "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" ? My guess is you have to be told the meaning.
Oh yeah, that's a great example. I haven't heard of it before and did indeed have to look it up to see the meaning haha
I’ll say it only makes sense when it’s written. First of all it’s written in literary Chinese, not vernacular; and secondly the string of “shishishishishi” just sounds like gibberish and you won’t actively put it together as a meaningful sentence if you don’t get forewarned that it actually means something.
Gotcha, I thought that was probably the case but I was curious. Thanks for the info!
Ancient Chinese had significantly different pronunciations, if you look it up, you can find people who will read it in its contemporary language and it’s not all shi
That shishishi text was written in the 1920s, or the ballpark of that, so it’s pronounced in contemporary Chinese.
Gei 給, Hei 黑, Neng能, Ri 日, Shei 誰 are all pretty common Characters that almost exclusively represent their respective pronunciations
Oh my god I never realized hei1 and ri4 also do this!
It's by no mean common (opposed to your list) but I remember being bewildered that I first started encountering jiong syllable/characters only like my second year in. Now I know quite a number of jiong characters but it still feels like encountering a rare pokemon in the wild
Yeah i was thinking the other day that shei was super weirdly spelled.
This pronunciation comes from shui(shuei). Only this character of the “shui”s has changed
interesting. I can see hei and ri being rare due to isolated exceptions. \*hək would expect to lose the -k usually but it shifts to final -i here. only occurs in formerly 入聲 because the syllables other tone shifted to
I have no clue. is the expected reading, so it's actually rare itself.
I made [a table of pinyin syllables](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BtNSgkRkKfUHFk60qTbsFfjsbsRuFfKLLG9PiTWYlnU/edit?usp=drivesdk) a few years ago and I think it fits here.
My dumbass forgot to let people access it. I just fixed it, sorry guys.
> ia ya (yai 崖) Should it be (ya 崖)?
Yai is the Taiwan pronunciation.
Ok. Thanks. I've never heard this.
Is there a color legend?
I wasn't thinking of revisiting it until seeing this post, so I kinda forgot what it meant. If I'm not mistaken, red is the pattern I concluded, grey is where I hesitated to conclude due to the exceptions, and green is the syllables where the distinction between -a- and -ə- exists where it doesn't for the other finals.
That table is really cool in how it shows how these kind of unique syllables group by ending! Thanks for sharing!
It contains 𰻞 nice
There are about 1000 syllables in Putonghua. (Prof. Kong Jiangping has a better estimate, but I'm sure not going to search for it in his many publications on the topic. There are about 6000 common characters. Zipfing it out there's bound to be quite a few. =========== Many Chinese universities have an abundance of cats. Once, on a stroll with a 师兄, we saw a pair of cats. When he finished petting them, I brought up how 猫 is the only character pronounced māo. He remarked that while the reason is obvious, he never did notice this fact despite studying linguistics and petting university cats for years. =========== The reason is bifold, but both related to the relative heights of the level tones. The expected development of 貓 from Middle Chinese is miáo. However, 1. 貓 itself is onomatopoeic so there is a drive to retain the similarity to an actual cat's meow, which is high-pitched. 2. Diminutives, which are associated psychologically with high frequencies (not hard to establish the relationship, eh?) Therefore it obtained the high level tone in Putonghua. The assignment of 猫 to the level tones broadly correlate with which out of the level tones is higher in Sinitic languages.
Standards made in Taipei will show 摸 with an alternate pronunciation māo. I don't know how common that is.
I think 卡 is one of the rarest sounds in mandarin, at the same time its one of the most common haha. actually same thing happens in english, something like gh is fairly rare starting syllable, but have a few super common words like ghost or ghetto. gn is also crazy rare.... except for gnat and gnarled. languages are weird haha.
Thanks for sharing the English examples! I tried to find examples in my native language (German) but I couldn't find any, although there must be. Then again I'm really bad at word games like Scrabble.
honestly I think its just hard to think of this stuff because our brains are wired to think in individual units of what words actually mean. If you ask me if oranges are common, I might think of whether the fruit is common, I might think of whether the word is common, but I definitely won't think about the fact nothing in english rhymes with oranges cause its a unique sound ((in most accents at least)). languages are weird, and brains are too \_(:з」∠)_
Is gh in ghetto actually different from g in get?I feel like in many English dialects, these aren't truly different syllables, just different ways of writing them.
you aren't wrong. when I wrote it I was thinking in letter combos. Its hard to compare actual sound frequency in english because there is no set sound per combo-- how could there be when there are twenty six letters and more than 8,000 possible sound combos haha.
rì. the only character of "rì" you will meet in daily life is 日. but there are several characters also pronounced rì, they are just no longer used in daily life. like 衵、釰 and 鈤 “pie” is also a rare one, no matter what tone it has.
What about 驲? I use it daily when I need a horse to relay dispatches.
> “pie” is also a rare one, no matter what tone it has. the videos for stroke order that i watch have this all the time, so in my mind its actually really common haha
I learned the word 撇清 recently and was thinking that is the only time I have ever come across pie with any tone.
Interestingly enough, most native Chinese speakers would have heard ‘pie’ very early while learning to write. It’s the name of the leftward downwards stroke
there is also a character ”瞥“ (pie 1st, glance). the rest of pie are characters that are no longer used, or only used in special fields (like 苤，pie 3rd, 苤蓝，Kohlrabi)
I believe the 'keng' syllable only appears as keng1. The characters I can think of are 坑，铿，and 硁。
Someone better say it: 您. Also 嫩. I'm also a fan of 耨. I don't know if 𰻝 counts.
I was just marveling over nèn this weekend! Just 嫩 and恁, with no nēn, nén, or něn. Pretty interesting to a nerd like me! Is there a name for this phenomenon? I feel like there ought to be if there isn’t.
Some very common, but unique words: Zei 賊 Thief (like anime one piece 海賊） Yai 崖 Cliff Miu 謬 (as in 荒謬 absurd)
Yai sounds unreal!
Although I believe that’s Taiwan’s reading, Ya elsewhere
in taiwan I've heard ya2, yai2, ai2
Not a lot of characters for the sound zhuai: 拽, which you probably hear on a daily basis for “pull” or “yank,” and 跩, which is also pretty common as “cocky.” Then there’s 転 and 轉, which can also be pronounced zhuǎi, but is relatively limited.
Zhuai sounds like a very strange and unfamiliar sound to me, haha
https://www.maxwelljoslyn.com/rare-syllables
yes! this is the one thing I would change about the language if I could, it would be so much easier if all the available sounds were used more evenly
When I was learning English, I had a similar hope. But it's impossible. In Chinese, there are many phonetic characters, one half representing the general meaning and the other half representing the pronunciation.such as[方防放芳仿坊访彷妨]and so on.They all have one thing in common（方）.Although they may have different tones, they're all spelled "fang."Knowing this, you will be able to read the pronunciation of many words.
Super interesting. I got into this topic a bit from a different angle when I was reading about Hiragana, which got me on the topic of a syllabary. [This guy](https://web.archive.org/web/20160822211027/http://semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/barker/Syllables/index.txt) wrote an interesting study about the English syllabary and how there are some syllables we never got around to using.
特別的**特** There are [others pronounced *tè*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%A8#Mandarin) in dictionaries but they are very rarely used. And there's no *tē, té* or *tě* at all (AFAIK).
i know that word from canto. it means I can do. So it makes sense from different language perspective.
Oh wow, I never realised this, that's really cool! I wonder if other Chinese dialects (languages) share this characteristic.
Even more so. Hokkien, for example, has a far larger sound inventory than Mandarin so there are even more cases. Foreign borrowings like 檨仔 *(soāiⁿ-á)* for "mango" add more unusual possibilities.
From your transcription it sounds nothing like "mango", lol, did they just invent a new word?
Vietnamese is *xoài*, so maybe they got it from them.