謝謝, 媽媽, 爸爸 - is second character always neutral?

[Christa]

Hi guys,

 

Weird question just popped into my head.

 

For doubled up character words, such as 謝謝, 媽媽, 爸爸 is the second character always a neutral tone?

 

Is there any rule regarding this?

 

Thank you!

 

Christina

[889]

Not hard to come up with examples in which the second character gets a full tone, like 个个 and 各各. (But not 哥哥.) Or 多多 or 宝宝 or 等等 as etc. (But not 等等 as wait.)

[Christa]

5 hours ago, 889 said:

Not hard to come up with examples in which the second character gets a full tone, like 个个 and 各各. (But not 哥哥.) Or 多多 or 宝宝 or 等等 as etc. (But not 等等 as wait.)

 

Yes, that's interesting.

 

In that case, any thoughts as to why the second characters in 謝謝, 媽媽 and 爸爸 all end up neutral?

[Shelley]

Does it have anything to do with which tone they are? So you wouldn't want two third tones together or even maybe two fourths because it is hard to do? Maybe the tone sandhi apply?

[Lu]

My guess is that it is more about how often the words are used (and how 'close' they are: note that many of Christa's examples are family members) than about tones. Compare 爸爸 to 个个: both 4-4.

[Christa]

9 hours ago, Shelley said:

Does it have anything to do with which tone they are? So you wouldn't want two third tones together or even maybe two fourths because it is hard to do? Maybe the tone sandhi apply?

 

26 minutes ago, Lu said:

My guess is that it is more about how often the words are used (and how 'close' they are: note that many of Christa's examples are family members) than about tones. Compare 爸爸 to 个个: both 4-4.

 

These are both interesting ideas. It does seem it should somehow be related to the difficulty of saying certain very frequently used terms - I wonder whether the tone is a factor in conjunction with the frequency.

 

Is it possible to make a list of examples where the second character becomes neutral and where it doesn't? Maybe a clear pattern will emerge.

 

So, in these, I think, the final character becomes neutral:

 

謝謝, 媽媽, 爸爸

 

And these, I think, don't:

 

 多多, 宝宝, 各各

 

Can anyone add any more to either group?

 

So far we have this phenomenon occurring for words that are (a) high frequency (b) 1st or 4th tone.

 

Can anyone add more examples to either to help define the rule further? 

[Lu]

姐姐，哥哥，弟弟，妹妹, and the rest of the clan.

[Christa]

2 hours ago, Lu said:

姐姐，哥哥，弟弟，妹妹, and the rest of the clan.

 

Thank you, Lu! This time I have given you a prize cup 

 

So, in the second character becomes neutral list, we have:

 

謝謝， 媽媽，爸爸，姐姐，哥哥，弟弟，妹妹

 

What characteristics do they share? They are all incredibly common. They include first, third and fourth tone words. So, tones don't seem to be part of it. Does anyone know a second tone example? Anyway, it now doesn't seem tone related. So, we're talking about very, very common words, mainly family members. Does anyone know any other non-family member examples, apart from 謝謝?

 

 

[889]

I think nouns are more likely to have a light tone on the second character than verbs and modifiers. But that's just an impression.

 

In any event, if you've got Wenlin or the ABC dictionary you should be able to whip up a list in a jiffy. Not more than a couple hours, three at most.

[Christa]

1 hour ago, 889 said:

 

In any event, if you've got Wenlin or the ABC dictionary you should be able to whip up a list in a jiffy.

 

Erm, I don't have those...

[889]

Do it with Pleco, then. Just run through the corpus of Chinese "syllables" doubled up.

 

By the way, Wenlin is a very good if somewhat expensive tool.

[Christa]

2 hours ago, 889 said:

Do it with Pleco, then. Just run through the corpus of Chinese "syllables" doubled up.

 

By the way, Wenlin is a very good if somewhat expensive tool.

 

Thank you for your useful suggestions, 889. Unfortunately, I am a bit of a technical idiot and can't work out how to do it.

[889]

You mean you don't know about about Pleco or can't install it? Or you have Pleco but don't know how to do the search I suggested?

[Christa]

1 minute ago, 889 said:

You mean you don't know about about Pleco or can't install it? Or you have Pleco but don't know how to do the search I suggested?

 

Currently the first two.

 

If I installed it then I expect it would become the third.

[889]

Here:

 

https://www.pleco.com/

 

Just download the free version, from the correct link depending on your device. (If you only have a PC, you're out of luck.)

 

(Like Wenlin, this is a very useful app for anyone studying or using Chinese.)

 

Once Pleco is installed, open it and click on the small keyboard icon. Then enter a doubled syllable, like weiwei. All the weiweis in the dictionary will suddenly appear with 汉字 as well as 拼音 and you can quickly pick out from the list any that are doubled characters.

 

Continue on for the remaining Chinese syllables. There are 372 common syllables, so at a half-minute each it should take about three hours to run through them all.

 

 

[Publius]

Plenty of nouns with an unstressed second syllable: 腦袋、頭髮、眉毛、眼睛、鼻子、耳朵、嘴巴、舌頭、下巴、胳膊、屁股、爸爸、媽媽、爺爺、奶奶、姥姥、姥爺、兒子、孫子、女兒、女婿、侄子、外甥、先生、小姐、老爺、太太…… Are they all related? You are thinking too much.

[艾墨本]

My understanding is that you all are talking about several different circumstances:

1) duplicating nouns (姐姐、宝宝): the second is a neutral tone

 

2) duplicated words that aren’t nouns (个个、高高): the second is not neutral and follows general rules regarding tones in connected speech. 

 

3) words with a suffix that doesn’t have it’s own meaning (头子、孩子、砖头，*头/子/生）

 

4) words with a character that is sometimes neutral but because in that specific word it carries meaning it is said with a tone (老子 as father vs 老子 as the Philosopher)

 

5) all the other words that have a second character that is neutral tone but doesn’t adhere to a rule. （头发）

[889]

Just so we don't go too far astray in this thread, I think we're only talking about what the OP calls "doubled-up character words." And perhaps doubled-up homophones.

[Publius]

Noun reduplication is very rare in Mandarin. When It occurs in kinship terms, it shares some properties with noun suffixes like 子、頭、兒 in that they carry little if any semantic meaning. The second syllable merely exists to satisfy the preferred disyllabic rhythm pattern of modern Mandarin. Also these kinship terms have a general 重・輕 pattern, even for those in which the second syllable is actually the head noun, such as 外甥. So there must be some kind of pattern extrapolation at play. This is also the case with diminutive reduplication for endearment such as 寶寶.

 

Another case of noun reduplication is when the noun is semantically akin to a measure word and the reduplication is used to emphasize 'each, every', e.g., 個個、天天. In this emphatic usage, the reduplicated syllable retains its tone.

 

Verb reduplication, on the other hand, is common. The reduplication of verb creates a casual tone and conveys the notion of 'a little bit' or 'briefly', and in the case of monosyllabic verbs, the reduplicated syllable is invariably weakened, e.g., 看看、試試. The expression 謝謝 is derived from verb reduplication and shouldn't be lumped together with 爸爸、媽媽 etc. in the first place.

[Christa]

Thank you for all these answers. I found your responses really interesting!