Youbian dubian

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Youbian dubian (Chinese: 有邊讀邊 pinyin: yǒu biān dú biān lit. "Read the side if any"), or dubanbian (讀半邊 dú bàn biān "Read the halve"), is an (often erroneous) method people use to read a Chinese character, when they do not know its exact pronunciation. A longer version is youbian dubian, meibian duzhongjian (有邊讀邊，沒邊讀中間 lit. "read the side if any; read the middle part if there is no side").

Most Chinese characters consist of two parts, one of which is the semantic part (often the radical), i.e. what this character has to do with (e.g. the part 貝 (shell) indicates that a character concerns commerce, as people used shell as currency in ancient times); another of which is the phonetic part, which shows how the character is or was pronounced (see more at Chinese character classification).

The phonetic part represented the exact or almost-exact pronunciation of the character when the character was first created; and characters sharing the same phonetic part had the same reading. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Chinese. However, over time, the reading of a character may be no longer the one indicated by the phonetic part due to sound change and other reasons.^[1]

When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of "folk reading" have become acceptable over time - listed in dictionaries as alternative pronuncations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁. Zhu Jianing (竺家寧) called this a "phenomenon of analogy" (類化現象), and demonstrated that the phenomenon can be observed in as early as the Song Dynasty.^[2]

In Standard Cantonese, this kind of "folk reading" helps distinguish the l- and n- syllables. An increasing prevalence of reading n- as l-, such as 農 ([nʊŋ]) as 龍 ([lʊŋ]), is found in Cantonese-speaking communities, which is termed "incorrect" by some. By this kind of "folk reading", Cantonese speakers are able to make out the "proper" pronunciation: e.g. since 農 has an n- syllable, words like 膿, 濃, and 儂 should own the same syllables, as all of them possess the same "side" 農. Similarly, 籠 and 聾 should start with an l- syllable as they have the common "side" 龍. A few exceptions, though, should be noticed, e.g. 良 (l-) vs 娘 (n-).

[edit] Notes

1. ^ See Qiu Xigui (裘錫圭), Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4, Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2000, section 8.6.
2. ^ See his article "Songdai Yuyin de Leihua Xianxiang" 宋代語音的類化現象, Taipei: Tamkang Journal 淡江學報, 1985:22, pp. 57-65.

[edit] External links

• (Chinese) 冯寿忠，《与读半边有关的常用字》，语言文字网。