Heilongjiang 2

Listen to Heilongjiang 2, a 21-year-old woman from Binxian, Haerbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 21

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/04/1990

PLACE OF BIRTH: Binxian, Haerbin, Heilongjiang Province

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Han Chinese

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: At the time of the recording, the subject was in her second year at university.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

Subject came to live in Suzhou, Jiangsu, 18 months before the date of the recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She majors in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. Subject had no native English-speaking teachers at school and has had minimal exposure (two hours a week) to native speakers at university in Suzhou. She does not like speaking English because she feels that she is very poor at it.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Bill McCann

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/04/2011

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Now, I will say something about my hometown. I come from Haerbin, Heilongjiang Province. It lies the northeast of the China, and I think it is the most beautiful place in China. It is famous for the ice and snow, so it is called the Ice City. There are the obvious differences among the four seasons. In the spring, the ice and snow can dissolve and the flowers bloom. And in the summer, it isn’t such hot as the southern. It is very comfortable. In the autumn, it is the harvest season; it is a pleasure season. We will get a harvest in this season, and the leaves become yellow. And (ah) in the winter, it is the world that is full of snow and ice. It is a white world and it is very cold. This is my hometown. Welcome to my hometown.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Bill McCann

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/04/2011

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Short readings from the analects of Confucius

The subject now goes on to read the following abstracts from the Analects of Confucius in her own Harbin dialect. (See the commentary below for details.) She did not provide a pinyin transliteration. The accent is very strong and quite different from that in the Heilongjiang 1 sample.

KEY: A = Mandarin (Simplified); B = Mandarin (Pingyin); D = English.

孔子: 论语 – Kǒng zǐ : lún yǔ – Kon zi:leng yu – Confucius: Lun Yu

學而第一 – xué ér dì yī – Xué ér dì yī – Chapter One

A: 1-1:-  子曰: 學而時習之、不亦說乎。

B: yī-yī :-  zǐ yuē: xué ér shí xí zhī, bù yì yuè hū.

D: 1-1:-  The Master said: Is it not pleasure to learn, and practice what is learned time and again?

A: 1-2:- 有朋自遠方來、不亦樂乎。

B: yī-èr:-  yǒu péng zì yuǎn fāng lái, bù yì lè hū.

D: 1-2:-  Is it not happiness to have friends coming from distant places?

A: 1-3:-  人不知而不慍、不亦君子乎。

B: yī-sān:  rén bù zhī ér bù yùn, bù yì jūn zi hū.

D: 1-3:-  Is it not virtue for a man to feel no discomposure when others take no note of him?

為政第二 – wéi zhèng dì èr – wéi zhèng dì ér – Chapter two

A: 2-2:-  子曰：「詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰：『思無邪』。

B: èr-èr:- zǐ yuē: shī sān bǎi, yī yán yǐ bì zhī , yuē: sī wú xié.

D: 2-2:-  The Master said: In the Book of Odes there are three hundred poems, but they may be summarized in a single sentence: Think no evil.

A: 2-7:-  子游問孝。子曰：今之孝者，是謂能養。至於犬馬，皆能有養；不敬, 何 以別乎。

B: èr-qī:-  zǐ yóu wèn xiào. zǐ yuē: jīn zhī xiào zhě, shì wèi néng yǎng. zhì wū quǎn mǎ, jiē néng yǒu yǎng; bù jìng, hé yǐ bié hū.

D: 2-7:-  Zi You asked what filial piety was. The Master said: Nowadays, providing support for one’s parents is considered filial piety. But dogs and horses can also do this. If there is no respect, what is the difference?

A: 2-10:- 子曰：「視其所以，觀其所由，察其所安。人焉叟哉？人焉叟哉？

B: èr-shí :-  zǐ yuē: shì qí suǒ yǐ , guān qí suǒ yóu, chá qí suǒ ān. rén yān sǒu zāi? rén yān sǒu zāi?

D: 2-10:-  The Master said: Watch what a man does. Find out his motives. See how he takes his ease. How then can the man hide his true self? How can the man hide his true self?

Commentary

Hēilóngjiāng is located in the northeastern part of China and borders Russia to the north and east. It contains China’s most northern and most eastern points. The name of the province literally means “Black Dragon River,” which is the Chinese name for the Amur, the river marking the border between the China and Russia. There are more than 1,900 rivers in Hēilóngjiāng, and this has allowed the creation of an extensive system of waterway transportation.

The area was isolated in ancient times, and there are few historical records. It was occupied by the Buyeo, Mohe, Khitan and other peoples whose names are Mongolian or Manchu. It was here that the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1235), which ruled most of North China, arose in Hēilóngjiāng. It finally became an administrative area in 1683, during the Kangxi era of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, from the northwestern part of the Jilin province.

In 1858 and 1860 the Qing government was forced to give up all land beyond the Amur and Ussuri Rivers to the Russian Empire. This cut China off from the Sea of Japan and gave Hēilóngjiāng its present northern borders. The Qing government then began to encourage Han Chinese migration into Manchuria, so that by the early twentieth century, the Han Chinese had become the dominant ethnic group in the region.

Harbin is a Manchu word meaning “a place for drying fishing nets,” and the city is bitterly cold in winter. Its old name is Pokai. Known as the “Ice City,” it is well known for its beautiful ice sculptures in winter. Human settlement in the Harbin area dates from at least 2200 BC (late Stone Age).

The sample comes from Binxian, a county level city lying to the east of metropolitan Harbin. Harbin dialect, a sub-dialect of Northeastern Mandarin, is phonologically close to the Standard Mandarin language, but the dialect itself carries with it strong cultural and regional connotations. The vocabulary is different from Standard Mandarin for two reasons. One of the sources of the distinct lexical features of the Harbin dialect is the area’s colonial Russian influence. The Russian colonial period started in the 1900s, which marked the start of the influx of large amounts of Russian vocabulary, especially neologisms created in Europe and Russia that had never existed in Mandarin. The second source of lexical difference, which is common to all Northeastern Mandarin dialects, is the influence of the area’s Manchurian heritage and ancestry.

It has some contrasts with Northeastern Mandarin; the dialect is spoken in the northeast of China (known as Manchuria in the West), except in the Liaodong Peninsula. It is closely related to Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) with generally little variation in lexicon; there are very few tonal changes.

Noticeable characteristics, which can be heard on the recordings, include the usual Chinese problems with [s] and [sh], [z] and [zh] pairs. There are also some examples of the /θ/- /s/ and /ʒ/- /s/ and the /v/ and /w/ minimal pair transpositions. The influence of her dialect is also very strong in places.

COMMENTARY BY: Bill McCann

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): 06/04/2011

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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