Huh, what did you say? Shenme?

POSTED BY: r8dhex
UPDATED: Saturday, September 18, 2004 12:57
VIEWED: 5536
PAGE 1 of 1

R8DHEX

Monday, August 9, 2004 12:10 PM

I've just started watching Firefly, I think it's shiny the way they use chinese in the dialogue.

It's nice that they actually use a real language, not inventing blabber and calling it chinese. or klingon.

One thing that annoys me though is the fact that they all pronounce things wrong. It distracts me since I'm chinese, but the way they say it, I have to rewind a few times to get what they're saying.

I guess it could be explained by saying that 500 years from now, from constant use those chinese words have entered the vernacular and have lost the original tonalization (since english isn't tonal).

Kind of like the way some chinese speak english. Sometimes, when they speak in english, as a force of habit I guess, tones are introduced into english

For example, here in Shanghai, ABCD, might pronounced in pinyin as ei2 bi4 xi1 di1.

Of course, same can be said of chinese movies where the characters try to speak english... believe me, I can't understand them either.

JAYNEZTOWN

Wednesday, August 11, 2004 6:48 PM

I've heard the Chinese was great but tones and pronunciation was just an after thought in Firefly, nice to hear some thoughts from a native speaker

such is the language of Mandarin or Cantonese and what happens when you don't pronouce it perfect

ben can become book 本 or stupid 笨 and yahn could turn into a wild goose or the word cover

I think the 500 yrs in the future could be a good excuse, if you consider all the varitaions in English, Australian English, Cockney, South African English, American English, Scottish dialect and so forth

So it isn't impossible to imagine that Chinese also gets a little changed as the years role on

AILIAN

Saturday, September 18, 2004 12:57 PM

Except that Chinese has been around for quite some time and, while pronunciations and word use have changed slightly, the tonality hasn't. I would think it more likely that a) Chinese "dialects" would collapse in favor of Mandarin, and b) English dialects and accents would collapse in favor of one specific dialect. In fact, I would think that the English would have changed more, but that's just me. ;)

As for Anglophones speaking Chinese, I'm very surprised that Inara, Simon, and his family wouldn't have better Chinese; considering the amount of *schooling* that they would have had to have gone through since childhood (note Simon's father reading the Chinese newspaper in a flashback), it seems that better pronunciation would have been used. The crew: Okay, I understand. The educated: Not as convinced.

And yeah. If you're a native speaker (or even a student!) listening to the Chinese being said, it's kind of painful. Quote my friend Yi, "e? shuo shenme????"