"x" sound

[Ferno]

Does the "x" sound change with different syllables? ie with "xiang" the "x" has an audible "sh" sound, but when I hear other syllables like "xin" the "x" seems to sound almost completely like a regular "s" - if I didn't know all the pinyin syllables, I would think it was spelled "sin" or something.

[Yuchi]

The 'xi' should sound the same on both with the 'sh' sound you mentioned.

[889]

To my ear, there certainly are inconsistencies in pinyin: does anyone ever rhyme ren 人 and men 门 ?

But I always hear x the same and hear it aspirated, that is, with a puff of air when pronounced. Sh is really a different sound.

[ala]

ren, men are the same to me...

what Ferno described may be due to dialect influence in the pronunciation of 尖团音. For example, until this century, 新 was pronounced "sin" (an ); while 兴, 向 were pronounced like today's "x" [c]. A lot of earlier romanizations distinguished "sin" from "xin"/"hin", but Beijing dialect eventually merged the two. The same for 津 [tsin] vs. 金 [tcin] or [kin], which are now both just "jin" [tcin]; hence Beijing was Peking and Tianjin was Tientsin in older romanization systems, whereas both are now "j". Just because Beijinghua merged them, naturally does not mean all Chinese speakers have merged them.

Ancient Chinese:

尖音: 新 /si/; 津 /tsi/; 清 /tshi/; 寻 /zi/; 情 /dzi/ == Fricatives/affricate Group

团音: 兴 /hi/; 今 /ki/; 轻 /khi/; 行 /Gi/; 琴 /gi/ == Velar/glottal Group

Voiceless merges:

/si/ = /hi/ --> Pinyin xi

/tsi/ = /ki/ --> Pinyin ji

/tshi/ = /khi/ --> Pinyin qi

Voiced merges:

/zi/ = /Gi/ --> Pinyin xi

/dzi/ = /gi/ --> Pinyin qi, ji

Anyone who knows a bit of Japanese, Wu or Cantonese in addition to Mandarin would know what I'm talking about.

There is also a "new feminine" pronunciation, where xin --> sin, but it applies for all syllables.

[johnd]

That's interesting ala. I alway presumed that the old spellings Peking, Tientsin, Nanking, etc., came to English via Cantonese, because the Cantonese for Beijing sounds like "Pucking" to me.

[ala]

Peking, Tientsin, Nanking, Chekiang (浙江), Kiangsu (江苏), Sinkiang (新疆) are based on the Imperial Postal system which is based on Mandarin variants that distinguish 尖团音. This does not mean that the Mandarin dialects actually pronounce 团音 ki as [ki], instead they pronounce it as [tci], but they distinguish 团音 ki [tci] from 尖音 tsi [tsi]; whereas Mandarin today does not (tsi = ki --> ji [tci]). In retrospect, a better romanization would be using the letter "c", as in Italian (e.g., "dolce", which in Latin would be pronounced with a hard k, but in Italian is [tSi]).

Another romanization (the basis of Hanyu Pinyin) that distinguishes 尖团音 is Latinxua Sinwenz 拉丁化新文字 (also the source of Pinyin "xi", which is really just "hi"). The key modification of Hanyu Pinyin was the removal of 尖团音 distinction from Sinwenz to better fit the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.