vijayjohn wrote:Hent wrote:Pretty much every Chinese dialect uses apa(aba) only Mandarin speakers say baba or fuqin. Right?
Sort of, I guess, but I have heard [papa] in Wenzhounese before.
Fuqin means father, is quite a formal word... nobody calls their own dad fuqin.
A lot of Chinese dialects
nowadays use baba (actually with [p] consonant), though the general trend seems that children tend to say [papa] and adults tend to say [pa] (one syllable).
Other words used traditionally throughout China are
die [tjɛ] and
da [ta].
Wenzhounese and Qingtianese traditionally belong to the
da area.
In Wenzhounese I've ever heard [papa] only in very young children, probably babies and toddlers. Normally I hear only [apa]. In Wenzhounese almost every family kinship starts with [a], including mum, dad, older and younger brother, older and younger sister, various kinds of uncle, various kinds of aunts, grandpa, etc.
In Qingtianese children tend to say [papa], while teenagers and adults tend to say [pa] or [æʔpa]. I switched when I was about 12 or 13. Personally I just say [pa], without the [æʔ] prefix.
The traditional words [ta]/[ata]/[æʔta] are becoming rarer nowadays and almost unused in my generation. But people still use them to refer to "dad" in third person and considered familiar/informal register.
Btw. How do you say TV in Qingtianese? In Wenzhounese it's dizze or something like that.
I think it's something like [da̤zɨ].
In Wenzhounese [dizɨ].
In Qingtianese [djazɨ].
[ɨ] being the same vowel of Mandarin diansh
i.