Where did the idea of pronouncing Pinyin ⟨x⟩ as /⁠ʒ⁠/ come from?

[Demonic_Duck]

/⁠ʒ⁠/ is the sound at the beginning of the English word "genre". Its closest equivalent in Mandarin is Pinyin 〈r〉. However, it seems to be increasingly commonplace to hear English speakers use this sound to represent Pinyin 〈x〉, which is baffling to me.

 

The most common case where I've heard this is on news reports pronouncing "Xi" as /⁠ʒiː⁠/, but I've also come across "Xiaomi" as /⁠ˈʒaʊmiː⁠/ and "wuxia" as /⁠ˈwuʒɑː⁠/.

 

[ɕ], the actual sound represented by 〈x〉, doesn't exist in English, so you wouldn't expect most English speakers to pronounce it exactly like that. The closest English-like approximation would be /⁠ʃ⁠/ as in "ship", or maybe /⁠s⁠/ as in "sip". Meanwhile, erroneous but intuitive pronunciations would be /⁠ks⁠/ as in "max", /⁠z⁠/ as in "xylophone", or maybe even /⁠x⁠/ as in the Spanish pronunciation of "México".

 

/⁠ʒ⁠/ is neither a close approximation nor an intuitive guess based on English orthography. Nonetheless, it seems too ubiquitous for there not to be some supposedly authoritative source that's promoting it, so what is that source? Is there some news anchors' style guide that's telling them all to say "President /⁠ʒiː⁠/"?

[889]

I'm too lazy to find it, but I believe there's an interview somewhere with Zhou Youguang 周有光, the "father of Pinyin," in which he touches on this.

 

(Whoops: I read your post too quickly and thought you were asking why x was adopted for this sound.)

[realmayo]

Good question, definitely hear it a lot. My guess is people are told that x is like the sh in English she, but a bit different, and they go the wrong way different. Or maybe they're told it's a sh and you've got to flatten your tongue.

 

Sounds like you need a couple of non-Chinese speakers to experiment on.

[Demonic_Duck]

Putting on my tin-foil hat for a minute, perhaps the Chinese state deemed /⁠ʃiː⁠/ (同 "she") far too feminine for strongman Xi, so they intentionally promoted the erroneous pronunciation as a way of protecting his macho image.

 

That would explain that particular case, but it still doesn't explain "Xiaomi" or "wuxia", unless people just extrapolated from "Xi" to other x-words ?

[realmayo]

In fact, isn't 〈x〉 = /⁠ʒ⁠/ the same pronunciation that many in the west use for the j in beijing?

[mackie1402]

I think a lot of people see a word starting with an X and think of any other words they are familiar with. In the west, all I can think of is the name Xavier, which is pretty similar to what you've been hearing. However, the pronunciation of Zhiyun and Huawei is what really grinds my gears! ?

[Lu]

Perhaps from the same misconception that brought the English-speakers 'Bei-zhing' (do other Western countries do that too? I've never heard it in Dutch, fortunately). Some kind of idea that it's an exotic language with exotic sounds, with x clearly being something 'we' can't reproduce, so 'we' skip to the nearest exotic sound 'we' know, from French. Something like that.

 

Huawei is here pronounced as Hü-ah-wai. This pronunciation is promoted by Huawei itself. Apparently they were counseled that Dutch people woudn't be able to produce the sound 'hwa-way' and this was the best to do for their Dutch customers. It grinds my ears.

[carlo]

According to this, the X in pinyin was inspired by Iberian languages. In particular Portuguese (which I can't speak so I've no idea if it's accurate). This page on Wikipedia points to Catalan as well.

[Demonic_Duck]

4 hours ago, mackie1402 said:

all I can think of is the name Xavier, which is pretty similar to what you've been hearing

 

I've heard English speakers pronounce that /⁠ˈhɑviɛj⁠/, /⁠ˈzɑviɛj⁠/, /⁠ˈzeɪviɚ⁠/, /⁠ɛksˈeɪviɚ⁠/, and so on, but never anything beginning /⁠ʒ⁠/.

 

7 hours ago, realmayo said:

In fact, isn't 〈x〉 = /⁠ʒ⁠/ the same pronunciation that many in the west use for the j in beijing?

 

4 hours ago, Lu said:

Perhaps from the same misconception that brought the English-speakers 'Bei-zhing'

 

This idea had occurred to me, as it's the same mistake but with a different Pinyin letter... but 〈j〉 as /⁠ʒ⁠/ is quite intuitive — common loan words already have that glyph-sound correspondence, e.g. "joie de vivre" — whereas 〈x〉 as /⁠ʒ⁠/ is highly unintuitive, at least to my mind.

 

4 hours ago, Lu said:

Huawei is here pronounced as Hü-ah-wai. This pronunciation is promoted by Huawei itself. Apparently they were counseled that Dutch people woudn't be able to produce the sound 'hwa-way' and this was the best to do for their Dutch customers. It grinds my ears.

 

For a while at least, they promoted /⁠ˈwɑːweɪ⁠/ as the "official" English pronunciation, which is even more baffling.

 

2 hours ago, carlo said:

According to this, the X in pinyin was inspired by Iberian languages. In particular Portuguese (which I can't speak so I've no idea if it's accurate). This page on Wikipedia points to Catalan as well.

 

That's super interesting — until today I had assumed Pinyin 〈x〉 was as unique as Pinyin 〈q〉, but I guess it's not at all!

[NinKenDo]

Not to wave my credentials around in lieu of sources, but Just about to finish my Masters in Applied Linguistics and I've thought about this whenever I hear this pronunciation. There are a couple intersecting factors I imagine are at play here when I think about this.

 

1. [⁠ʒ] is actually pretty damn close to [ɕ] in ter4ms of place and manner of articulation. So in and of itself it's not a completely terrible choice as a sound which exists in an English speaker's repertoire. Of course, what you're wondering is why things which seem like closer choices aren't chosen instead, but I would say having spent time learning a few languages at this point, the mapping of sounds isn't always what seems most close at a glance, and there can be all kinds of reasons for this, including historical, consider why Mandarin speakers when transcribing English will often render an English /a/ as /ja/. At the face of it, Mandarin /a/ seems like a better choice. So in terms of this particular sound we can consider alternative options and why they might not be chosen.

 

2. You mention how [⁠ʃ⁠] would be a more appropriate rendering which I agree with, however that sound is already mapped to the retroflex /⁠ʃ⁠/ in Mandarin, given it's probably the closest sound English has, and that the orthography is the same, this makes 100% perfect sense. My guess why this phoneme is not chosen is because it's obvious from Chinese orthography that this would be reducing 2 phonemes to one. I'm not sure how conscious this awareness is amongst English speakers, but I suspect it isn't totally absent amongst those who care to pronounce things somewhat accurately.

3. You mention [ s ] as another option, also very close, but I think it faces the same issue as the above, there is already an /s/ phoneme in Chinese and it is recognisably different and orthographically distinguished, so I think many of the same arguments apply. Also I have heard English speakers pronounce (x) like this, and even before knowing anything about Mandarin, this always seemed really off, there's something "missing" is my feeling when I heard it.

 

So what to do with the /ɕ/ phoneme, when it's clearly phonemically distinc6t even to people knowing very little about Chinese phonology, but the two closest sounds are already taken? English speakers go to the "third choice" as it were. While [⁠ʒ] might feel quite distant, it's certainly the closest sound left that is used in English phonology. Short of English speakers pronouncing a sound not in their phonological repertoire, it really does seem the best choice if one accepts the explanation that speakers are hesitant to merge the phonemic distinctions between two of these three sounds.

 

Occasionally I've toyed with the idea of doing research on the phenomenon, but I imagine there's already better people doing better research, I'm just too lazy to find it.

[Demonic_Duck]

All good points.

 

Of course, the fact that [⁠ɕ⁠] and [⁠ʂ⁠] (or [⁠ɕ⁠] and [⁠s⁠], for that matter) are in complementary distribution mean that flattening both to /⁠ʃ⁠/ wouldn't actually introduce any ambiguity... But then again, English speakers wouldn't be expected to know that fact, and the additional flattening of [⁠ɻ̩⁠], [⁠ɹ̩⁠], and [⁠i⁠] finals into /⁠i⁠/ that's common due to all being represented by Pinyin 〈⁠i⁠〉 would introduce ambiguity between e.g. 〈⁠xi⁠〉 and 〈⁠shi⁠〉.

 

But that kind of ambiguity is already inevitable with 〈⁠qi⁠〉 and 〈⁠chi⁠〉 and so on, unless English speakers were encouraged towards such heresy as pronouncing Pinyin 〈⁠q⁠〉 as /⁠k⁠/ ?

[NinKenDo]

Definitely. I think what you point out strengthens my belief that the difference in orthographic representation plays a huge role in this. I'm going to pay more attention now to see how (i) behaves in (ch|q) contexts, I would say it's the one instance I can think of where an orthographic distinction is generally collapsed? Maybe? Perhaps because all reasonable alternatives are taken? Perhaps because as you say they are complementary and therefore rather than move to a different consonant that is too far away, speakers can rely on the vowel? Do they though, I honestly can't remember from my anecdotal experience. The more I think about it the more interesting it would seem to investigate.

[markhavemann]

7 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

 

Of course, the fact that [⁠ɕ⁠] and [⁠ʂ⁠] (or [⁠ɕ⁠] and [⁠s⁠], for that matter) are in complementary distribution mean that flattening both to /⁠ʃ⁠/ wouldn't actually introduce any ambiguity... But then again, English speakers wouldn't be expected to know that fact, and the additional flattening of [⁠ɻ̩⁠], [⁠ɹ̩⁠], and finals into /⁠i⁠/ that's common due to all being represented by Pinyin 〈⁠i⁠〉 would introduce ambiguity between e.g. 〈⁠xi⁠〉 and 〈⁠shi⁠i⁠〉.

Could it be that [⁠ʒ] just has that "foreign" feeling that people expect, so they choose that over a "sh" sound when both are available. For the same reason that "chow mein" has stuck when "fried noodles" would be so much easier but less exotic.

 

After posting I saw that @Lu had already touched on this but I somehow missed that post.

 

On 6/25/2021 at 4:01 PM, Lu said:

Perhaps from the same misconception that brought the English-speakers 'Bei-zhing' (do other Western countries do that too? I've never heard it in Dutch, fortunately). Some kind of idea that it's an exotic language with exotic sounds, with x clearly being something 'we' can't reproduce, so 'we' skip to the nearest exotic sound 'we' know, from French. Something like that.