Week Seven: Practice and more research on tones

Based on previous practice on the single Chinese characters, I now started to pay more attention to the suprasegmental features on the tonal changes in Wuhan dialect in the archetype. In order to keep track of the tonal changes, I use Pinyin transcription with tones to mark the features. Here is a sample used in my transcription.

I also found a chart with "transition" from Pinyin to IPA for further reference:
http://talkbank.org/pinyin/Trad_chart_IPA.php

In this week's practice, I did several similar demos to compare with the archetype. I noticed that when producing the 3rd tone, the original sound tend to be more flat and the duratio is longer. Then I changed my own speech a little bit to imitate the 3rd tone. As for the whole archetype, even it also share four tones, the general flunctuation is not as obvious as those tones in Mandarin Chinese. In addtion, the general flow of the speech is a little "blurred". I asked my friend who provided the archetype. She told me that the blurred speech is actually an outstanding feature of Wuhan dialect.

Here attached is the Pinyin Transcription and my practice Demo:

In next week, I decide to go back to the whole poem and begin my general practice without transcription's help.







Here is my attempt according to the Pinyin script: