Week Five: Focus on the Vowels

Somehow I failed to post the original file, here is the new one:

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In the past week, I tried to focus on the vowels in Wuhan Dialect. As we know in the first post, Mandarin Chinese uses its unique Pinyin (拼音) system to mark the pronunciation patterns instead of using IPA. And one important advantage of using this kind of system is because of the unique monophthongs and diphthongs in Mandarin Chinese: different from core+coda system, we tend to use more unified vowel clusters, so in the following section, I will use Pinyin to distinguish the vowel systems in Wuhan dialect.

As I listened to the archetype and compared the online resource, I noticed that there is no distinction among "en/eng" and "in/ing", as for other nasalized vowel cluseters, Wuhan dialect has an, ang, en, in, ong.

As for other vowel clusters, here is a chart with the reprenetative Chinese characters. I tried to practice the following pronunciation with Wuhan accent and compared the differences between the same character's pronunciation in both Mandarin Chinese. I marked the different ones with different background color in the followin chart.

开口呼	齐齿呼	合口呼	撮口呼	备注
ɿ子此十支是	i一比力七气	u五不附户古	y女于入主出	ɯ二日kʰɯ去(白读)
ɑ八大乍下撒	iɑ牙甲恰家瞎	uɑ话瓦瓜化刷	ɕya靴(白读)
o窝末多左合	io约若虐学削
ɤ北得克蛇革	ie也别劣邪绝	uɤ说国虢或获	ye月决掘缺穴	“茄”“薛”“劣”开合不定
ai艾拜乃在介		uai外怪快拐衰
ei贝杯最披内		uei瑰未吹锐回		“最”“脆”“岁”开合不定
ɑu奥包刀少早	iɑu巧妖了小苗
ou欧口杜六竹	iou又牛九囚秀
an南安凡旦短	ien言片天千偏	uan丸船官款欢	yen铅沿倦玄软	“全”“癣”“县”开合不定
ən恩硬崩吞存	in印民丁巾心	uən文坤昏横混	yĭn春允永均唇	“倾”“寻”“旬”开合不定
ɑŋ汤方上巷郎	iɑŋ仰两江香羊	uɑŋ王旺窗光狂
oŋ翁中孟木工	ioŋ荣茸穷兄雄			开合不定者多表现为“武合汉开”

Here is my practice episode for the Chinese Characters:
Vowel Clusters

From the chart above, I noticed that there is no systematic one-to-one correspondence between the vowels clusers in Mandarin and Wuhan dialect from a modern language's view, instead, it is closely related with the prosodic system in Ancient Chinese. So I hilighted all the target, distinct Chinese character in the poem I read and pay special attention to the target vowel clusters. 

Trial Five
I think in this week's practice, I became more aware of the unique vowel cluster features of this target dialect. Though I am not very used to the vowel changes in the Chinese characters, I gradually get the basic vowel posture of Wuhan dialect.So in the upcoming week and the spring break, I will focus on the vowels in suprasegamental level and try to be more familair with the dialectual features.