On July 6, 2021, in Mingzhu Community, Minzhu Town, Langao County, Ankang City, Shaanxi Province, the staff of "4: 30 Class" were teaching children to read pinyin. Xinhua news agency
Xin Yuan/Cartography
figure 1
Recently, the pronunciation of the pinyin letter "O" has aroused widespread concern and discussion, and the reading volume of related topics is nearly 100 million. One of them is entitled "Do you know? Is the pinyin "O" pronounced "Ou" or "Wo"? Weibo believes that "many people will ‘ o’ Read as ‘ Wo ’ . The staff of the Ministry of Education said that according to the current teaching standards, the pronunciation of # Pinyin O should be pronounced in Europe #. "
According to the author’s search, the content comes from a tweet "Pinyin" O pronounced "Europe" or "Wo" published by WeChat official account Capital Education, the official WeChat of Beijing Municipal Education Commission. 》。 The article holds that: "At present, academic circles are concerned about ‘ o’ The pronunciation of ""has always been controversial, and there is no special unified consensus. At present, the pronunciation of teachers in teaching is set according to the teaching standards issued by the education authorities every year, and the current standard is to identify ‘ o’ It is a single vowel, pronounced ‘ Europe ’ 。”
From this point of view, it seems that reading the vowel "o" as "ou" is the official opinion. However, the paper does not point out the source of the document "Teaching Standards issued by the education authorities every year", and the author has no way to verify it.
As a member of the research group entrusted by the Ministry of Education, I was very concerned about this topic. Here, I want to talk about how to pronounce the vowel "o" from three aspects: the source of the Chinese Pinyin Scheme (hereinafter referred to as the Scheme), the original intention of the developer and the actual pronunciation of Beijing pronunciation.
First of all, we should make it clear that the pronunciation of Chinese phonetic letters in the Alphabet (called the "names" of letters in the Scheme) is not the same as the pronunciation of initials and finals in the Initial List and the Final List. When people ask how to pronounce the "O" in "ι, O, E", they refer to the pronunciation of the vowel "O", not the pronunciation (name) of the letter "O" in the Alphabet "N, O, P". Therefore, what we are discussing here is the pronunciation of the vowel "o", not the pronunciation of the letter "o", although the pronunciation of the two is the same in the Scheme.
The author thinks that the vowel "o" in the vowel table should be pronounced "wo" instead of "ou".
Historically, the Scheme comes from the phonetic alphabet developed by the Pronunciation Unification Association before liberation (agreed in 1913, published in 1918, revised in 1920, and renamed as "phonetic symbol" in 1930) and the "French phonetic alphabet of Mandarin Roman characters" developed by the Mandarin research society "Several People Association" (agreed in 1926 and published in 1928).
Li jinxi, a famous linguist, used to be a member of the Research Committee of Mandarin Romance Pinyin, and also a member of the Association of Several People. In his book The Basic Tool of Chinese Standardization — — From phonetic alphabet to phonetic alphabet, it is clearly pointed out that the phonetic alphabet "ㄛ" is "‘ Wo ’ It explains that Beijing has always pronounced the vowel "ㄛㄛ" as "ㄨㄛ" because it can only spell "ㄨㄛ".
Qian Xuantong, a famous linguist, is one of the members of the "Association of Numbers". He interprets the pronunciation of "O" in the Roman characters (Latin letters) in Mandarin as follows: In fact, there is no such vowel in Mandarin, "Wo, Guo, Kuan, Fire, Wave, Slope, mo, Buddha, Duo, Camel, Nuo, Luo, Zuo, Wrong, Suo. As for other sounds, they must be spelled with uo. (quoted from Wang Li’s Chinese Phonology)
Zhou Zumo, a famous linguist and professor of Peking University, once served as a member of the "Audition Committee" after liberation. He pointed out in the "Chinese Pinyin Letter Learning Method (Revised Edition)" that "O" is a post vowel. The tongue position is lower than u, and later. The back of the tongue surface bulges to the soft palate, the tip of the tongue hangs under the lower teeth, the lips are slightly round, but not prominent, and the muscles are not tense. This is the vowel sound in the words "dial" (bō), "slope" (pō) and "touch" (mō).
Mr. Zhou Youguang, a famous linguist who participated in the development of the Plan, once said when recalling the formulation process of the Plan: "bo" is written in Beila (referring to "the new Latin script of northern dialect") and "do" is written in Duomo. Pinyin (referring to "Scheme") means "bo" for "Bo" and "duo" for "Duo". It is suggested that all the letters can be saved by writing in Beila. It is also suggested that the word "wave" should be written as "buo", which is unified in specifications and conforms to the principle. After studying, the Program Committee decided to adopt the traditional writing method of phonetic alphabet. ("Recalling the Formulation Process of the Chinese Pinyin Scheme")
Mr. Xu Shirong participated in the development of the Program, and served as a member of the Audition Committee for two times. When explaining the pronunciation of the vowel "o", he said: [see Figure 1]=o, and the vowel with a round lip in the second half [see Figure 1] is a slightly opened symbol under [o]. Appears after "lip sounds" B, P, M, F and round-lipped vowel u([u] or [w]). A Brief Introduction to Phoneme in Beijing.
Since the vowel "O" in the Scheme is used to mark the vowels of the words "Bo" (bō), "Po" (pō), "Mo" (mō) and "Buddha" (fó) according to the original intention of the developer, the correct pronunciation of "O" should take the vowels of these words, that is, these syllables. The author is not from Beijing, but has lived in Beijing for more than 20 years. The author tried to ask several Beijing-born teachers and friends, and they would naturally pronounce uo.
The vowel "O" after the initial of lip sound in Beijing pronunciation is a variant of the same vowel as "uo" after other vowels, which can not only be verified by Beijing people’s sense of language, but also be supported by experimental phonetics.
When describing the phonetic value of the vowel "o" in Putonghua, famous experimental phoneticians, Professor Lin Tao from Peking University and Professor Wang Lijia pointed out that the tongue position of o[o] is slightly lower than that of the positioning vowel [o] in the international phonetic alphabet, and it is a post vowel between half-high and half-low, and the strict phonetic notation should be [oт]. Because the tongue position of [o] is obviously lower than that of [u], the degree of round lips is also worse than that of [u]. In Mandarin, [oт] only appears after the lip consonant alone, and there is often a very short [u] in front of it, so the strict phonetic notation of [o] should be [uoт], but this [u] is actually only a transitional sound between the lip consonant and [o], and the degree of round lips is poor, which is also the inevitable result of the low tongue position. (Phonetics Course)
Mr. Shi Feng, a well-known experimental phonetician and a member of the research group "Formulation of Pronunciation Criterion of Putonghua and Revision of Pronunciation Table of Different Pronunciation Words in Putonghua", pointed out when describing the phonetic value of the vowel "o" in Putonghua: the actual pronunciation of the vowel o[o] after the lip consonant is lipped [u] and has a vowel u, which should be a second-order vowel like the uo after other initials. ("Reanalysis of Putonghua Vowels")
The Chinese character marked with the vowel "O" in the Scheme is "Oh". The word "oh" has two pronunciations, one is an exclamation (also written as "oh") and the other is a cock’s cry (w), so we are not sure how to pronounce the vowel. However, according to the descriptions of several scholars who participated in the development of Mandarin Roman characters and the Plan, we know that this vowel refers to the vowel in the syllables represented by the Chinese characters "Bo, Po, Mo and Buddha", not to the vowel of the exclamation.
Of course, we can’t completely rule out the speculator’s intention to use the exclamation "oh" to express the vowel of a single vowel (going back to Qian Xuantong’s Notes on the Changes of Phonetic Symbols in the Past Eighteen Years, we can see that the Chinese characters he noted on the vowel "o" are really "oh", which is contradictory to his own statement about the vowel "o" quoted in the previous article). However, the reading method of interjections changes greatly in people’s oral actual sound value, or has great vagrancy and uncertainty. The reason why "oh not" is written as "oh" and "yo y not" is written as "yo" shows that the vowel "o" in exclamatory words is closer to the [] in the international phonetic alphabet (see Wu Shuyan’s Pronunciation of the vowel o in Chinese Pinyin Scheme), so the exclamations "oh (oh)" yo (yo).
To sum up, the vowel "O" in "Scheme" is used to mark the vowel symbols of "Bo" (bō), "Po" (pō), "Mo" (mō) and "Buddha" (fó) according to the original intention of the developer. "O" is only spelled with the initial consonant of lip sound, while "uo" is only spelled with other initial consonants other than the initial consonant of lip sound, and their positions are complementary, so we can think that "O" and "uo" are different variants of the same vowel. Reading "O" as "Wo" is not only in line with the original intention of the developers of the Scheme and the actual pronunciation of Beijing dialect, but also in line with the principles of general phonetics, and can be verified by experimental phonetics, which is a correct pronunciation, rather than a "misunderstanding" as mentioned in the above-mentioned tweets and posts.
Now some people pronounce the vowel "o" as "ou", which may be influenced by the pronunciation of the English letter "o", and it may also be related to the fact that these people don’t know that the pronunciation of letters in the Alphabet and the pronunciation of vowels in the vowel table are two different things. Reading the vowel "o" as "ou" not only does not conform to the original intention of the developers of the Scheme, but also causes the vowel to be mixed with another vowel "ou ou" that has no historical origin and complementary distribution, which is an undesirable mispronunciation. If the vowel "o" is read as "ou", then "bo", "po", "touch" and "Buddha" should be read as bōu, pōu, mōu and Fó u. Isn’t that ridiculous?
Article 18 of Chapter 1 of the Law of People’s Republic of China (PRC) on National Common Language stipulates: "The national common language uses the Chinese Pinyin Scheme as a tool for spelling and phonetic notation. The Chinese Pinyin Scheme is a unified standard for the spelling of Roman letters in Chinese’s names, place names and Chinese documents, and is used in areas where Chinese characters are inconvenient or unusable. Primary education should be taught in Chinese Pinyin. " The Chinese Pinyin Scheme is the national standard of Chinese Pinyin and has the binding effect of laws and regulations. Reading the vowel "o" as "ou" is a wrong pronunciation and should be corrected. The author appeals that the media should be cautious when releasing information related to language standards or regulations, so as to avoid the negative impact on the teaching of Chinese Pinyin and the promotion of Putonghua in primary education and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.
(Author: Meng Pengsheng, a researcher at the Institute of Chinese Language and Literature, Southwest University)