BOOK REVIEWS
236
student can afford, or indeed wishes, to carry Cordier and his successors around, and yet needs a handy reference.
Hong Kong, September, 1972
JAMES HAYES
MANDARIN PRONUNCIATION EXPLAINED WITH DIAGRAMS. Raymond Huang. Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press.
It is truly unfortunate that the book under review fails to do what it was intended to do. The expressed goals are important, and students and teachers of Chinese do indeed need a pronunciation guide of the type proposed in the present volume. However, the book is marred by some basic mistakes which effectively destroy its credibility and negate its value as a guide for beginners.
From the text and references one can deduce that the author is a trained phonetician and that his knowledge of English phonetics is very good. But it is also obvious that he did not give the same attention to Chinese. As a result his articulatory description of Chinese is full of errors, the Chinese-English contrasts are unreliable, and the overall product is more harmful than helpful.
As a minor example, in discussing Mandarin tones the author has confused the 5th tone as marked in Mathews' Dictionary (all of which are reflexes of entering tone forms in final -p, -t, and -k, still distinctive in some Mandarin dialects) with his own 5th tone which is the modern Mandarin unstressed, atonic form. Thus (p. xxvi) he marks the question particle ma as 5th tone in his system because it is often toneless, but he notes that the 5th tone does not occur in modern Peking Mandarin and seems to imply that this is why Mathews' Dictionary marks this character with 4th tone. Historically this particular form was not in the entering tone category and would never be marked 5th tone in Mathews. Huang's comments simply compound confusion on the matter.
But a much more flagrant error is his attempt to describe Mandarin initial stops and affricates as contrasting on a voiced-voiceless axis. Thus, the author tells us that the Wade-Giles initial consonant pairs p p', t t', k k', ch ch', ts ts' contrast in the same way as English p b, t d, k g, ch j and ts dz. If this were actually true, one of the major stumbling blocks would be removed from
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236
BOOK REVIEWS
student can afford, or indeed wishes, to carry Cordier and his suc- cessors around, and yet needs a handy reference.
Hong Kong, September, 1972
JAMES HAYES
MANDARIN PRONUNCIATION EXPLAINED WITH DIAG- RAMS. Raymond Huang. Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press.
It is truly unfortunate that the book under review fails to do what it was intended to do. The expressed goals are important, and students and teachers of Chinese do indeed need a pronunciation guide of the type proposed in the present volume. However, the book is marred by some basic mistakes which effectively destroy its credibility and negate its value as a guide for beginners.
From the text and references one can deduce that the author is a trained phonetician and that his knowledge of English phonetics is very good. But it is also obvious that he did not give the same attention to Chinese. As a result his articulatory description of Chinese is full of errors, the Chinese-English contrasts are unreli- able, and the overall product is more harmful than helpful.
As a minor example, in discussing Mandarin tones the author has confused the 5th tone as marked in Mathews' Dictionary (all of which are reflexes of entering tone forms in final -p, -t, and -k, still distinctive in some Mandarin dialects) with his own 5th tone which is the modern Mandarin unstressed, atonic form. Thus (p. xxvi) he marks the question particle ma as 5th tone in his system because it is often toneless, but he notes that the 5th tone does not occur in modern Peking Mandarin and seems to imply that this is why Mathews' Dictionary marks this character with 4th tone. Histori- cally this particular form was not in the entering tone category and would never be marked 5th tone in Mathews. Huang's comments simply compound confusion on the matter.
But a much more flagrant error is his attempt to describe Mandarin initial stops and affricates as contrasting on a voiced- voiceless axis. Thus, the author tells us that the Wade-Giles initial consonant pairs p p, t, kk, ch ch, is ts contrast in the same way as English p b,ật d, k g, ch j and ts dz. If this were actually true, one of the major stumbling blocks would be removed from
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