When in China, be sure to watch your tone

Months into my yearlong stay in China, I still cannot understand what is happening in the grocery checkout line. Two more women have joined an energy-charged discussion at the cash register. The short woman waiting to pay for her groceries keeps waving a fistful of paper money at the green-smocked cashier. A taller woman in a smock and a third woman are pointing to the cashier’s video screen. All four of them are talking at the same time. Occasionally they break into unrestrained Chinese smiles, but the flow of words continues uninterrupted. Situation normal.

In China, language is everything. During my stay as a J. William Fulbright lecturer at Fudan University in Shanghai, I have picked up a few Chinese words and phrases. But even though I’ve spent months trying diligently to learn Chinese, I’m as perplexed as ever. This language poses special problems, for several reasons.

One is that Chinese is completely different from European and Near Eastern languages. Linguists speak of language “families,” and English, Russian, Persian and Hindi, for example, are relatives – they’re members of the Indo-European family. Mandarin and Cantonese – the two main dialects of Chinese, among seven – evolved completely separately from the European languages. Even Bulgarian, with which I have some familiarity, has cognates – or words with common ancestors – with English. Bulgarian uses an alphabet (Cyrillic) that represents words by the sounds used to pronounce them, just like our Roman alphabet. By learning the Cyrillic alphabet and watching for cognates, I can recognize many Bulgarian words and use my phrase book to make myself understood, no matter (usually) how clumsy my pronunciation.

But the Mandarin phrase book is not so helpful. For one thing, Chinese written characters do not make up an alphabet as we understand it.

There is no way to “sound out” most Chinese words because each word, or syllable, is represented by a single character which is a picture, or an abstraction from a picture. Because of the written words’ pictorial qualities, calligraphy is a greatly respected art form in China, going back more than 3,500 years to the first “oracle bone inscriptions.” And while two Chinese people speaking different dialects cannot understand each other, they can read each other’s writing. The characters have standard meanings, regardless of the sound to which each corresponds.

The only way to know a character’s pronunciation and meaning is to memorize them. It is said that a knowledge of 4,000 to 5,000 characters is required to read a Chinese newspaper.

A bigger problem at the grocery store is that a spoken word, or syllable, can have at least four completely different meanings. This is because each word in Chinese is spoken in one of four “tones.” There is a tone spoken high in the throat and held without rising or falling; a second tone begins at a midrange of the voice and rises; the third tone begins at a lower midrange, falls, and then rises; and the fourth tone begins at a slightly higher midrange and sharply falls. A word is formed not only by a combination of vowels and consonants, but by the tone in which it is spoken.

To most Westerners, these tones at first are indistinguishable, and almost impossible to pronounce. For example numbers, which in my experience are usually the easiest part of learning a language, have been daunting. I can count to myself in Mandarin: yee, ar, san, seu, woo-oo, lee-o, chee, bah, jee-o, sheu. (These are my phonetic spellings; the official Romanized spellings are different.) But when I first tried to say these numbers in the open-air market, shopkeepers regarded me with amused bewilderment. One time I wanted some eggs. I walked up to a covered booth, gestured toward the crates piled with brown hen’s eggs, and said to the smiling woman, “sheu” – 10. She paused, then quizzically held out a plastic bag, having no idea what I was talking about. I had pronounced the syllable “sheu” in the wrong tone, or maybe in no recognizable tone at all. For all I knew, I was saying “airsickness.”

Eventually I got my 10 eggs, but using gestures, not words. I can’t understand what the women at the cash register are debating about because my Western ear listens by habit for combinations of vowels and consonants, but has not learned to hear the tones in which they’re pronounced.

The vowels and consonants themselves are problematic. Many of them are not exact equivalents of ours, and converting Chinese spoken sounds into Western alphabets has always given translators trouble. In 1958 the Chinese government standardized the conversion by adopting the Pinyin system of writing Chinese. In this system, the name of Chairman Mao, which earlier had been represented as Mao Tse-tung, is written “Mao Zedong.”

How did they get from “Tse” to “Ze,” and from “tung” to “dong”? One answer is that these consonants do not exactly match sounds we use; they actually have pronunciations located in between sounds familiar to us. In Mao’s second name (which is his given name – Mao is his family name), the consonant which begins the syllable “dong” is not exactly our “d,” and not exactly our “t,” but a sound in between them. The same for “ts” and “z.”

Similarly, the name of the city in southern China now known as Guangzhou (roughly: gwahng-jo) was pronounced by 19th century British as Canton.

Go figure. And make sure you get the tones right. Having pointed out the difficulties of Chinese, I must add, however, that its complexities give rise to literature of a richness and beauty equal to – though different from – the most moving and complex literature in English. I say this with great respect and reverence for the richness of English. Chinese, through its writing, offers dimensions for conveying meaning that are mainly not found in English. And while English offers unique possibilities of poetic rhythm and sound, Chinese tones create possibilities for wordplay and music unlike anything heard in the West.

The key phrase is “unlike anything heard in the West.” It’s what makes me listen intently in the grocery store, even though I have no idea what the women are arguing about. It’s clear from their smiles, and the energetic way they prolong the discussion, that the music of their words is at least as important to them as the problem they’re trying to solve. They enjoy hearing themselves talk as much as I do, as I catch deeper, unsayable meanings from the indecipherable and beautiful sounds.

“Letter From …” is a monthly column by a Maine resident or person with ties to this state, who is living or traveling far from home. This month’s piece is by Dana Wilde, a Troy resident and adjunct faculty member at the University of Maine in Orono, who won a Fulbright grant enabling him, his wife, and son, Jack, to live for one year in Shanghai, China. He is teaching graduate courses in American literature and American poetry at Fudan University in Shanghai.