Chinese Doesn't Have Many Syllables (And Why That's Interesting)

0:00 Modern Standard Chinese is often called Mandarin... which is a stupid name, so I'm going to call it "Standard Chinese". In Standard Chinese, Standard Chinese is "普通话", which is spelled like this. This means "common talk". They also use the word "hanyu" to refer to all the Chinese dialects, which many Chinese people consider to be part of one greater Chinese language. This word makes sense, because it means sweat... feather. And that's the problem with pinyin... or any transliteration of Chinese for that matter - you never know what "han" or "yu" is actually referring to. What I said would be spelled like this. And the actual word is spelled like this, with the character for "han" as in the "Han Chinese people" and a character for language.

0:45 Although the actual word for language is "语言" which means "language speech", because on its own, "yu" means rain. Also this could mean bad face if you really wanted it to. Also also, this could mean... garden... open... beg for arms... I guess? So what point am I trying to make by spewing all these nonsense words? What's going on here? Well, in short, Chinese doesn't have many syllables. Let's take a look at Chinese phonemes. It's difficult to count the exact number of these... but the two things I came up with that make the most sense to me is either 30 phonemes, counted like this, or 36 phonemes counted like this. Note the five tonemes included here in both of these. Those are the four tones of Standard Chinese, plus the toneless phoneme, which can all be shown with the /妈/麻/马/骂/吗 distinction.

1:34 This isn't actually an unusually small number of phonemes. Actually with these phonemes, you could make tens of thousands of different syllables. The reason Chinese has such few syllables isn't because it has few phonemes - it's because of its restrictive phonotactics. Phonotactics are essentially how a language lets you string its phonemes into syllables, consonant clusters and vowel sequences. English has relatively few phonotactic rules, but they do still exist. For example, look at this word I made up... "blanicking". This isn't a real English word, but I mean... it could be, right? This has the FEEL of an English word. Compare it to something like "knah" or "ngadb". These don't sound English at all! But I mean... why not? All these phonemes exist in the English language! There's not a single non-English sound here! They don't sound English because they violate English phonotactics.

2:19 Modern English doesn't allow for the consonant clusters "kn" or "gn" to appear at the beginning of words, which is why the "k" in words like "knight" or the "g" in words like "gnome" have become silent over time. This "h" here... sure, it exists in English, but it can only appear at the beginning of syllables, like in hat or rehash. The opposite can be said of this velar nasal, the "ng" sound. It's supposed to be at the END of a syllable, like in "singing". And this consonant cluster is rare, and it certainly can't occur word finally. In Standard Chinese, phonotactics are FAR more restrictive. The phonemes and phoneme sequences of Chinese are probably best understood as initials, finals and tones. Here's a table of all the initials and finals for you. These ones can go at the start of a syllable, and these ones can finish a syllable off.

3:05 You also have zero onset here. As you see, "b" and "ai" are both Chinese sounds, but you can't make the word "aib". That would be like saying "ngadb" in English. So to get to the total number of syllables, we times the number of initials by the number of finals, then times five for the five tonemes (including toneless)... ...and you get a grand total of 4440 possible syllables! That's actually not very many compared to other languages... But wait! Because Chinese phone tactics are actually more restrictive than that. These combinations don't exist. "Fi" - no, impossible to say. "Ber", "per", "mer" - absolutely not. So the actual chart of all the possible initial final combinations looks like this. Now we times this one by five and... Actually we don't. For a lot of these syllables all five tonemes simply don't occur.

3:51 The toneless phoneme is very rare, mostly just occurring in a few grammatical particles like "ma (吗)" and "ne (呢)". And some of these syllables only have one possible tone associated with them, like "keng", which only really ever has a first tone. So all in all, the total number of syllables used in Standard Chinese is difficult to know exactly... but is somewhere just above 1200. Compare this to how many syllables are in common usage in German or English, or how many possible syllables there are in either of these languages. Standard Chinese has a ridiculously small inventory of syllables, which leads to some interesting things. "But wait!" I hear you say. "What about languages like Japanese?" Japanese has 10 times less syllables than Standard Chinese, with most estimates going only up to as few as 120 syllables in the entire language. What makes Standard Chinese any different from this? The thing is, Standard Chinese has a fairly consistent one-syllable-per-morpheme rule.

4:41 A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning within a language, and in Japanese, one can be made by shoving a lot of syllables together, like here. But in Standard Chinese, and other Chinese dialects, units of meaning are generally a syllable in length each. This means that 1200 syllables means 1200 phonetically distinct morphemes... which is a big problem, because humans tend to want to say more than 1200 things. So how does Chinese handle this? Well, first of all, it's worth noting that this isn't a problem in the written language. Because Chinese doesn't write things phonetically, using morphemic characters instead, there's never any ambiguity in writing as to what something means. But for the spoken language, there are a few methods used, aside from just boring old context, to get the meaning across. The first is set phrases. For instance, take "yu" from earlier. It's generally recognised that on its own, this means "rain".

5:29 However, in a compound like "hanyu", we know it's language because "Chinese language" is a set phrase. Similarly, "pu" might mean "general and universal" but in a phrase like "caipu", it means "register" or "manual", because the phrase as a whole is understood to mean "cookbook". Secondly, there's noun suffixes. The word for "table" in Chinese is "桌子", with the noun suffix "子" here essentially telling us that this is a thing, not "clumsy" or "to clutch". However, when you want to say "tablecloth", this is "桌布". You see how that noun suffix disappeared? That's because that "布" is already making it clear which "zhuo" we're talking about... essentially turning it into one of those set phrases. And thirdly, my favorite. I couldn't find a good name for these so I'm gonna go ahead and call them "complementary morphemes", because I think that makes sense.

6:17 Let's take our old friend "yuyen"... and let's see now. "Yu" can mean... give, offer, a preposition, eaves, house, the universe, a small island, a feather or plume or a note of the Ancient Chinese pentatonic scale, to bow, rain, language, this surname, a horse stable, an enclosure for storing grain, corrupt or bad. "Yan" can mean.. prolong, speech, tight, beautiful, along, scorching, rock, grind, table salt, the entrance to a lane which is also a surname, feast or banquet, face or countenance, or eaves again. Both of these probably have many more meanings as well that my dictionary just couldn't fit. Anyway, if we take a look at these meanings, we see that one group here stands out very clearly - this language speech pair complement each other well. The "yan" morpheme here isn't adding any meaning... it's clarifying that this is the languagey meaning of "yu", because it itself has something to do with language. Another example would be the word "ming"... which can mean "light"...

7:05 or also "dark". Yeah. But with complementary morphemes, you can clarify which one you mean! Whilst "mingliang" means "light" or "bright", "huiming" means "dark and obscure"... because "liang" means "bright" complementing that meaning of "ming", and "hui" means "dark and gloomy", complementing THAT meaning. But this system has its limitations. People will automatically think "dark and gloomy" when they hear it... but "huiming" caaaaan also mean... "night and day". And without seeing the characters, there's no way of knowing that! There's a lot of these purely literary words in Chinese, that only work when written down. So think about that the next time you complain about Chinese characters or go around saying that everyone in China should start using pinyin, or something else, to spell out their words.