Another nerd post about Doctor Who.
The two most recent episodes of Doctor Who make some remarks about the number of non-human lifeforms. As the doctor says, there are "[over] a million million" entities on the planet.
A million million?
Clearly, he means, over 1012, or, 1000 000 000 000. And yet, in the previous episode, he refers to 109 as being a "billion", clearly following the American example. As such, why is it that he can't remain consistent and therefore refer to 1012 as being a trillion?
Or perhaps, the point of contention that Doctor Who is a [British] BBC production, and should therefore use traditional UK English as opposed to American English (also known as reformed British. They've also since ammended certain orthographical conventions like the single/double quotes, and connexion/connection). In which case, 109 should be "a thousand million", and 1012 should be "one billion".
The geek/mathematician in me demands that the great Doctor Who be at least consistent in his numbers! >.<
As point of reference, the traditional UK system of numbers works as follows:
106 = million
109 = thousand million
1012 = billion
1015 = thousand billion
1018 = trillion
etc.
Therefore, X-illion = 106x
For some reason, however, the Americans decided that "a thousand million" didn't sound nice enough, and decided to push up the use of prefixes, thus making there numbers significantly smaller. So in the American version:
106 = million
109 = billion
1012 = trillion
1015 = quadrillion
1018 = quintillion
etc.
So, for America, X-illion = 103(x+1)
Incidentally, the number system in East Asia, namely that used in China, Korea and Japan, goes by groups of 4s, or "myriads" (after the archaic Greek number "myriad" for 10000). Unfortunately, like most Chinese innovations, these namings aren't very productive; they don't really generate subsequently large numbers, since their names aren't derived from numbers themselves. But the cool part means that each number is named uniquely, and apparently from Buddhist sutra. Thus:
104 = man (萬)
108 = oku (億)
1012 = chou (兆)
1016 = kyou (京)
1020 = gai (垓)
1024 = shi (秭)
1028 = jou (穣)
1032 = kou (溝)
1036 = kan (澗)
1040 = sei (正)
1044 = sai (載)
1048 = goku (極)
1052 = kougasha (恒河沙)
1056 = asougi (阿僧祇)
1060 = nayuta (那由他)
1064 = fukashigi (不可思議)
1068 = muryou (無量)
1072 = taisuu (大数)
Fun stuff, eh? :D
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Company Man
WARNING: liberal use of IPA letters in this post. Some computers may not display all characters correctly (although Unicode should be enough). Also, I'm not a professional transcriber, so my IPA guides may be greviously erroneous. //Warning
Anyone who enjoys espionage and prescriptive linguistics would enjoy the movie Company Man. The main character, a high-school English teacher, somehow ends up working for the FBI (or CIA... something) because of his grammatical prowless.
Anyway. That has nothing to do with what I'm planning to blog about today. (Although, if you do get the chance, I highly recommend watching the movie, despite it being rated exceptionally lowly on IMDB.com. I suppose the general audience don't have an appreciation for quasi-linguists-turned-international spies.
So, on the busride home from a shopping spree with my roommate (although I didn't end up purchasing anything, except lunch), I was confronted with the delightful opportunity of making an amateur analysis of the linguistic patterns of a pair of passengers seated directly behind me and my roommate. For the majority of their conversation, the two speakers (one male, one female) spoke in English, but it was fairly evident that both were native Mandarin speakers.
At first, I was slightly unnerved at being forced to listen to someone else's conversation, especially when the conversation is between strangers. But then, the jarring, unnatural patterns of speech became a source of study for me.
It quickly became evident later (confirmed when they eventually switched to speaking Mandarin), that the female was from mainland China who came to Canada much later in life than the male, who although possibly Taiwanese, sought to adapt the Beijing standard of speech (his inability to follow as fluidly in Mandarin betrayed his age of immigration).
My findings were as follows (of the male speaker; I didn't care much for the female):
1. Dropping of medial and final dental/alveolar plosives (and possibly replaced with aspiration)
Of the most commonly used words, these involved "it's" becoming /ʔihs/, "that" /thah/, "not" /nawh/. Additionally, words like "considered" became /consihereh/. This probably stems from Mandarin lacking any sort of terminal plosives, fricatives or affricates. Indeed, the only real syllable/word-endings that exist in Mandarin are vowel sounds, /n/ and /ŋ/. Curiously, /k, g/ seem to be less affected.
2. Nasalisation of vowels
This occured commonly, especially with the -ing ending of verbs/gerunds. Thus, "voting" became /vohĩ/ (instead of /'voutiŋ/), but also for replacing glides and approximants (/w, l, n/), as in /faĩoh auwh/ for "filed out".
3. Vowel Approximation
This is probably most common for any ESLer, or any second language speaker for that matter. My Russian friends tell me that I mess up their vowels somehow. (But then again, I haven't tried very hard either.) Most commonly, in native Mandarin speakers, this seems to suggest that they aim for the orthographical letter as opposed to the naturally schwa syllable. Thus, "fulfill" becomes /fohfiw/.
In summary, native Mandarin speakers who seek to speak a more natural variety of English should be especially careful about their schwa vowels, and ending syllables with consonant sounds.
Also, I should probably note that I haven't written this post in an elaborate form of spite towards immigrants or non-native speakers. Rather, I hope that this post makes more native English speakers aware that there isn't just one "Chinese accent". Also, hopefully this proves a semi-funtional guide for native Mandarin speakers to pinpoint and curb their natural habits in order to speak English more effectively.
Hopefully, my next post will be about native Cantonese speakers.
Anyone who enjoys espionage and prescriptive linguistics would enjoy the movie Company Man. The main character, a high-school English teacher, somehow ends up working for the FBI (or CIA... something) because of his grammatical prowless.
Anyway. That has nothing to do with what I'm planning to blog about today. (Although, if you do get the chance, I highly recommend watching the movie, despite it being rated exceptionally lowly on IMDB.com. I suppose the general audience don't have an appreciation for quasi-linguists-turned-international spies.
So, on the busride home from a shopping spree with my roommate (although I didn't end up purchasing anything, except lunch), I was confronted with the delightful opportunity of making an amateur analysis of the linguistic patterns of a pair of passengers seated directly behind me and my roommate. For the majority of their conversation, the two speakers (one male, one female) spoke in English, but it was fairly evident that both were native Mandarin speakers.
At first, I was slightly unnerved at being forced to listen to someone else's conversation, especially when the conversation is between strangers. But then, the jarring, unnatural patterns of speech became a source of study for me.
It quickly became evident later (confirmed when they eventually switched to speaking Mandarin), that the female was from mainland China who came to Canada much later in life than the male, who although possibly Taiwanese, sought to adapt the Beijing standard of speech (his inability to follow as fluidly in Mandarin betrayed his age of immigration).
My findings were as follows (of the male speaker; I didn't care much for the female):
1. Dropping of medial and final dental/alveolar plosives (and possibly replaced with aspiration)
Of the most commonly used words, these involved "it's" becoming /ʔihs/, "that" /thah/, "not" /nawh/. Additionally, words like "considered" became /consihereh/. This probably stems from Mandarin lacking any sort of terminal plosives, fricatives or affricates. Indeed, the only real syllable/word-endings that exist in Mandarin are vowel sounds, /n/ and /ŋ/. Curiously, /k, g/ seem to be less affected.
2. Nasalisation of vowels
This occured commonly, especially with the -ing ending of verbs/gerunds. Thus, "voting" became /vohĩ/ (instead of /'voutiŋ/), but also for replacing glides and approximants (/w, l, n/), as in /faĩoh auwh/ for "filed out".
3. Vowel Approximation
This is probably most common for any ESLer, or any second language speaker for that matter. My Russian friends tell me that I mess up their vowels somehow. (But then again, I haven't tried very hard either.) Most commonly, in native Mandarin speakers, this seems to suggest that they aim for the orthographical letter as opposed to the naturally schwa syllable. Thus, "fulfill" becomes /fohfiw/.
In summary, native Mandarin speakers who seek to speak a more natural variety of English should be especially careful about their schwa vowels, and ending syllables with consonant sounds.
Also, I should probably note that I haven't written this post in an elaborate form of spite towards immigrants or non-native speakers. Rather, I hope that this post makes more native English speakers aware that there isn't just one "Chinese accent". Also, hopefully this proves a semi-funtional guide for native Mandarin speakers to pinpoint and curb their natural habits in order to speak English more effectively.
Hopefully, my next post will be about native Cantonese speakers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)