Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

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Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby outcast » Tue Feb 08, 2022 11:32 am

So yes, after 7 years of Mandarin Chinese (although really studied it for 3-4 years, with gaps in between with other languages), I am dabbling in Cantonese. Well, I call it dabbling at 1 hour a day or so, but that could very well be formal study for the average folk.

Not only do I have an extremely solid understanding of Mandarin grammar, but also characters, and I feel quite comfortable with spoken Mandarin for independent life. I don't think I am C1 in the language yet because I lack some of the finer forms of structures and definitely still lack specialized vocabulary and ways of speaking (idiomatics), but I am working on that as we speak.

I also have read about Cantonese for a long time now: the general grammar, the differences with Mandarin grammar, I have studied the phonology and Jyutping. So I already know what to expect in terms of differences with Mandarin. And any vowels that Cantonese has and Mandarin doesn't I already know how to produce thanks to French or German.

Given the above, as you might expect, so far Cantonese has been a total breeze (this is only speaking about the beginner level).

But I need to resolve a question that is killing me, and I need natives and foreigners with experience in the Cantonese world on this:

JUST HOW IS Jyutping Z / C produced??? as in 中国 zong1gwok3 or 早晨 zou2san4 ?? I have heard the spoken languagefrom various study sources by now, and I can tell you that the majority of speakers in these courses or even podcasts DO NOT pronounce it the way these initials are represented in IPA (/ts/ and aspirated /ts).

The "z" in particular, supposedly /ts/ like Mandarin Pinyin "z" or German z, sounds nothing like that. It sounds in some speakers like a cross between /ts/ and "J" sound as in "jeep". In some speakers it sounds almost like Mandarin "zh" (which is a semi-retroflex).

Can anyone set me straight here? Is there an official pronunciation, is there variation between speakers or variation of the sound depending on the phonological environment (around what other consonants or vowels it occurs?) For now I am just imitating what I hear, but I am annoyed at the lack of clarity from my consulted sources thus far. Thanks!
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby smallwhite » Tue Feb 08, 2022 1:58 pm

Hey, I know what you mean. It should be Z, similar to German Zeit but unaspirated. The English J as in Jeep but unrounded, is common but not proper. The wrong one is called palatalised or something. I remember asking my friends to say the sound and I recall mentioning the Z-vs-J results on HTLAL or LLorg. I grew up saying J, thinking Z was wrong because it sounds lazier, but I’ve grown further up now. Let me look for the video that enlightened me.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby Querneus » Tue Feb 08, 2022 2:12 pm

I think this is one of those things where what Cantonese speakers understand as correct or higher pronunciation differs from regular everyday pronunciation. Most people from Hong Kong who are about my age (born in the 1990s) seem to have [tɕ] (alveolo-palatal) everywhere except before [ɐ aː]. You just need to hear anyone in their 20s saying gong1hei2faat3coi4 [tɕʰɔːi˨˩] and prove it to yourself (also, yes, that's not a typo: gong1 [kɔːŋ˥], not the higher/older gung1 [kʊŋ˥]!).

So, I think you're correctly hearing zong1gwok3 (yes, not the higher/older zung1gwok3!) and zou2san4 with the ch/j-like sound [tɕ]. This is one of those cases where IMO you should believe your ears more than linguists' descriptions, because the descriptions are... biased, arguably outdated. Many works from the 20th century or even later describe Cantonese as having the allophone [tɕ] before [iː ɪ yː ʏ]. Robert Bauer and Paul Benedict in Modern Cantonese Phonology (1997: 28-29) say it's [tɕ] before [iː ɪ yː ʏ œː ɵ] (and IIRC they mention at some later point having encountered a young speaker who had [tɕ] "everywhere"). And I simply think it's been widely expanded to [ɛː ɔː] as well since then.

BTW, interestingly, Victoria Yip and Stephen Matthews in Cantonese: A Reference Grammar (1994: 403) say that female speakers are more likely to palatalize the consonants before [œː ɵ]...
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby outcast » Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:19 pm

Querneus wrote:I think this is one of those things where what Cantonese speakers understand as correct or higher pronunciation differs from regular everyday pronunciation. Most people from Hong Kong who are about my age (born in the 1990s) seem to have [tɕ] (alveolo-palatal) everywhere except before [ɐ aː]. You just need to hear anyone in their 20s saying gong1hei2faat3coi4 [tɕʰɔːi˨˩] and prove it to yourself (also, yes, that's not a typo: gong1 [kɔːŋ˥], not the higher/older gung1 [kʊŋ˥]!).

So, I think you're correctly hearing zong1gwok3 (yes, not the higher/older zung1gwok3!) and zou2san4 with the ch/j-like sound [tɕ]. This is one of those cases where IMO you should believe your ears more than linguists' descriptions, because the descriptions are... biased, arguably outdated. Many works from the 20th century or even later describe Cantonese as having the allophone [tɕ] before [iː ɪ yː ʏ]. Robert Bauer and Paul Benedict in Modern Cantonese Phonology (1997: 28-29) say it's [tɕ] before [iː ɪ yː ʏ œː ɵ] (and IIRC they mention at some later point having encountered a young speaker who had [tɕ] "everywhere"). And I simply think it's been widely expanded to [ɛː ɔː] as well since then.

BTW, interestingly, Victoria Yip and Stephen Matthews in Cantonese: A Reference Grammar (1994: 403) say that female speakers are more likely to palatalize the consonants before [œː ɵ]...


You are right, I have also been pondering about the "u" sound, as it doesn't quite sound like the short /ʊ/, so I had to review that aspect as well. I guess it was noticeable enough somehow for me to take a second look.

I am a bit confused as to what I had read in the past about this "z" consonant phenomenon. What you are describing is completely the OPPOSITE of what I thought I had read: my memory kept claiming that it was the palatal sounds that had disappeared, not the other way around! Take a look at this if you have a moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese ... cal_change

Am I reading that all wrong? As far as that section is concerned, it was the palatals that were replaced by the /ts/ sounds! And I have no idea about /s/ but I have never heard the palatal version /ɕ/ that exists in Mandarin, so I'm assuming that sound has been completely replaced.

I am now curious if this palatal phenomenon is somehow due to Mandarin phonological encroachment / interference in the younger post-handover groups.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby smallwhite » Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:27 pm

> female speakers are more likely to palatalize

Because it sounds ABC-like (Axxx-born Chinese-like). They even add retroflex nowadays, so 左 Zɔ approaches Draw and 住 Zü approaches Drew :lol: Some have even started to voice their Zs :lol:
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Feb 08, 2022 3:57 pm

outcast wrote:I am a bit confused as to what I had read in the past about this "z" consonant phenomenon. What you are describing is completely the OPPOSITE of what I thought I had read: my memory kept claiming that it was the palatal sounds that had disappeared, not the other way around! Take a look at this if you have a moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese ... cal_change

Am I reading that all wrong? As far as that section is concerned, it was the palatals that were replaced by the /ts/ sounds! And I have no idea about /s/ but I have never heard the palatal version /ɕ/ that exists in Mandarin, so I'm assuming that sound has been completely replaced.

I am now curious if this palatal phenomenon is somehow due to Mandarin phonological encroachment / interference in the younger post-handover groups.

Based on the examples here, I think what that section is saying is that Cantonese preserved the Middle Chinese palatal series until the 1950s. The original Middle Chinese palatals were not preserved in Mandarin, because they were merged with the retroflex series. I believe the new palatal series in Mandarin started out as a phonetic, not phonemic, distinction where the alveolars would become palatal before an i, but it became phonemic after the deletion of some i medials. So in the examples in the article, you get a retroflex in Mandarin if there was a Middle Chinese (or pre-50's Cantonese) palatal, which contrasts with the modern Mandarin palatal, but in contemporary Cantonese this distinction is lost.

So if I understand correctly, the palatalization of alveolars in Cantonese is phonetic and happens before front vowels (which is similar to how Mandarin's phonemic palatals came about), but the phonemic alveolo-palatals from Middle Chinese are gone.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby Querneus » Tue Feb 08, 2022 6:49 pm

outcast wrote:You are right, I have also been pondering about the "u" sound, as it doesn't quite sound like the short /ʊ/, so I had to review that aspect as well. I guess it was noticeable enough somehow for me to take a second look.

People are increasingly pronouncing the -ung [ʊŋ] final as -ong [ɔːŋ].

I am a bit confused as to what I had read in the past about this "z" consonant phenomenon. What you are describing is completely the OPPOSITE of what I thought I had read: my memory kept claiming that it was the palatal sounds that had disappeared, not the other way around! Take a look at this if you have a moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese ... cal_change

Am I reading that all wrong? As far as that section is concerned, it was the palatals that were replaced by the /ts/ sounds! And I have no idea about /s/ but I have never heard the palatal version /ɕ/ that exists in Mandarin, so I'm assuming that sound has been completely replaced.

I am now curious if this palatal phenomenon is somehow due to Mandarin phonological encroachment / interference in the younger post-handover groups.

What that section is saying is that Cantonese had the separate phoneme series /tsʰ, ts, s/ and /tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ until about the 1950s. It used to be that 足 zuk1 (Mandarin zú) and 竹 zuk1 (Mandarin zhú) sounded differently, as they do still in standard Mandarin. This is one of those things where Mandarin is actually more conservative than Cantonese. But even Williams' 1856 dictionary reports people would confuse the two old series already, although Bauer and Benedict (p. 436) report the distinction was included in Cantonese dictionaries as late as 1981 (presumably because some people insisted in retaining it as a learned and proper thing, much like l vs. n today).

And now the distinction is completely gone. So we now have the situation of a single /tsʰ, ts, s/ phoneme series, which is sometimes [tsʰ, ts, s], sometimes [tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ] depending on the following vowel.


I'm surprised smallwhite thinks the /tsʰ, ts, s/ should always be [tsʰ, ts, s] ("German Zeit but unaspirated" for /ts/), by the way. Not an opinion I've seen before.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby smallwhite » Wed Feb 09, 2022 9:08 am

> I'm surprised smallwhite thinks the /tsʰ, ts, s/ should always be [tsʰ, ts, s] ("German Zeit but unaspirated" for /ts/), by the way. Not an opinion I've seen before.

I don’t remember what it was I read to get that impression. I remember I watched a video made by a university or something similar, then listened to samples on https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/, and I likely googled a bit. Can’t find the video now.

Both versions are common and the distinction is blurry or not obvious anyway, so not important for me as a native. Natives from Hong Kong likely know about the -ng -> -n and kw- thing but not this palatalisation thing or the oi vs ngoi thing.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby outcast » Wed Feb 09, 2022 2:55 pm

Querneus wrote:
outcast wrote:You are right, I have also been pondering about the "u" sound, as it doesn't quite sound like the short /ʊ/, so I had to review that aspect as well. I guess it was noticeable enough somehow for me to take a second look.

People are increasingly pronouncing the -ung [ʊŋ] final as -ong [ɔːŋ].

I am a bit confused as to what I had read in the past about this "z" consonant phenomenon. What you are describing is completely the OPPOSITE of what I thought I had read: my memory kept claiming that it was the palatal sounds that had disappeared, not the other way around! Take a look at this if you have a moment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese ... cal_change

Am I reading that all wrong? As far as that section is concerned, it was the palatals that were replaced by the /ts/ sounds! And I have no idea about /s/ but I have never heard the palatal version /ɕ/ that exists in Mandarin, so I'm assuming that sound has been completely replaced.

I am now curious if this palatal phenomenon is somehow due to Mandarin phonological encroachment / interference in the younger post-handover groups.

What that section is saying is that Cantonese had the separate phoneme series /tsʰ, ts, s/ and /tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ until about the 1950s. It used to be that 足 zuk1 (Mandarin zú) and 竹 zuk1 (Mandarin zhú) sounded differently, as they do still in standard Mandarin. This is one of those things where Mandarin is actually more conservative than Cantonese. But even Williams' 1856 dictionary reports people would confuse the two old series already, although Bauer and Benedict (p. 436) report the distinction was included in Cantonese dictionaries as late as 1981 (presumably because some people insisted in retaining it as a learned and proper thing, much like l vs. n today).

And now the distinction is completely gone. So we now have the situation of a single /tsʰ, ts, s/ phoneme series, which is sometimes [tsʰ, ts, s], sometimes [tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ] depending on the following vowel.


I'm surprised smallwhite thinks the /tsʰ, ts, s/ should always be [tsʰ, ts, s] ("German Zeit but unaspirated" for /ts/), by the way. Not an opinion I've seen before.


Off the cuff comments but these forum glitches are starting to get annoying ... :(

Anyway, I understand clearly now. Honestly I did know that the section was referring to the original series of consonants, but it still surprises me that they state the merger resulted in a /ts/ series of sounds in the modern language, when clearly, we all agree that it is not that sound. I guess I trusted them too much, thinking "well, if they are discussing /tsʰ, ts, s/ and /tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ series merger, then the writer(s) clearly can distinguish these sounds, so they would also know that in the current speech of many Cantonese speakers, the actual sound produced by many speakers is not the /ts/ series. I think this threw me for a loop.

It happens with grammar too. Older and modern conservative grammars clearly tell you that in Mandarin you CANNOT use the conjunctions 跟,和 to connect two clauses or verbs. But I have heard plenty of people just do that, mostly with two verbs. Connecting two full clauses is still jarring and sub-standard to most. I wonder if this is a real change, or that there is a difference made between two full clauses (with a verb), and two verbs that are interpreted as INSIDE one clause:

调查研究这个问题。

I always assumed this was not allowed, but perhaps I misinterpreted the explanations in those grammar books. Perhaps you CAN connect two verbs like this so long as they are not both creating their own clause (我喜欢看书和爱吃羊肉串*** ). This one sounds wrong to almost everyone.

Does Cantonese have the same notions as Mandarin in the usage of conjunctions like 同 etc.
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Re: Cantonese Jyutping z/c sound confusion

Postby Axon » Sat Feb 12, 2022 8:23 pm

Deinonysus wrote: The original Middle Chinese palatals were not preserved in Mandarin, because they were merged with the retroflex series. I believe the new palatal series in Mandarin started out as a phonetic, not phonemic, distinction where the alveolars would become palatal before an i, but it became phonemic after the deletion of some i medials.


I think it would still be considered a phonetic difference since are no minimal pairs in Mandarin with only a palatal/non-palatal consonant distinction. The palatal series in Mandarin evolved from dental, velar, and glottal stops and fricatives all becoming palatal before high front vowels.
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