My friends in Kaohsiung just taught me the word for "taro" 芋頭.
I looked it up and found yu4 tou5 but my friends here insist it's yu4 tou2.
Is this a pronunciation difference between Taiwan vs the mainland?
asked Sep 8, 2016 at 16:01
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2examples of nouns with suffix 头 tóu or tou (cf. ISBN 0-415-15174-0) tou : 锄头、木头、芋头 、舌头、骨头、榔头、砖头、馒头、指头、浪头、念头、想头（colloq）、看头（colloq），甜头、奔头儿， tóu ：年头、苦头、噱头（dial）、钟头– user6065Commented Sep 8, 2016 at 18:19
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My popup dictionary (Perapera), which usually does show multiple pronunciations, only shows one for each of these. It shows only tone 5 for all of them except 年头, 噱头, and 钟头, for which it shows only tone 2. I haven't checked any other dictionaries yet. Thanks!– hippietrailCommented Sep 9, 2016 at 4:16
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2kinezika.info/pdf/ModernMandarinChineseGrammar_Textbook.pdf："In Beijing and northern China, certain syllables lose their original tone and are pronounced as neutral tone. This tone change does not occur in Taiwan, where all syllables retain their original tones。"– user6065Commented Sep 20, 2016 at 14:34
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4 Answers
This is actually one example of a more general phenomenon. Mandarin, as spoken in Taiwan, uses weak stress (the neutral tone) much less often than Mandarin as spoken in northern areas. This is true not only of Taiwan speakers, but of other areas as well. According to Jerry Norman's 1988 book, Chinese (p. 149):
Weak stress (neutral tone) is an essential feature of the standard language, and of most northern dialects, but because its occurrence is lexically determined it is difficult for non-Peking speakers to master. Speakers of putonghua from many regions in South China, however, employ only a very small number of weakly stressed syllables, and these are chiefly limited to grammatical suffixes and particles.
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Great stuff. I had actually known about this a couple of years ago but forgot about it while I wasn't exposed to Chinese, or at least to Taiwan. Commented Sep 11, 2016 at 5:35
I dont know about taiwan, but both ways of pronunciation( tone, specifically) are natural in mainland China. And tou5 does sound native to people in many parts of China, but I myself barely notice.
Dictionaries can't tell you stuff like this.
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2Well dictionaries can tell stuff like this if they are well made. But not all dictionaries actually do. Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 9:25
In my opinion, it is a regional pronunciation difference. I've checked the educational bureau dictionary of Taiwan, it is yùtou5.
However, it is often pronounced as yùtóu. And personally, I said this a lot too.
頭tóu:
- head ex.人頭
- leader
- top or end ex. 山頭
- beginning of an event ex.從頭開始
- measurement ex.一頭牛
- using as adjective, beginning of, in the front ex.頭幾排
- those just some common usages... and more you can check the dictionary (the dictionary which I used is called 萌典, a Taiwanese Mandarin dictionary)
頭tou5:
suffix ex.舌頭、上頭
And most of the people just pronounce all as tóu here in Taiwan.
There'are two different pinyin of 頭 in Mandarin: |tou2| tou5|
頭|tou2|
[1] [n] head; hair; hairstyle
[2] [adj] first; top; start; end
[3] [n] chief; leader; boss
[4] [n] side; party; aspect
[5] classifier for certain domestic animals
頭|tou5
suffix for certain objects, location words, and adjectives (to form a noun)|
Example:
彩頭 cai3 tou2
頭髮 tou2 fa3
風頭 feng1 tou2
鐘頭 zhong1 tou2
All the example words contained 頭 has tone 2 reading. (I am wondering why they didn't include a tone 5 reading example.) It shows |tou2| is the primary pinyin of 頭
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I've only checked Wiktionary and Perapera so far. I'm sure Perapera gets its data from CEDICT. Of course both Wiktionary and CEDICT are community-edited projects. So they will contain errors and omissions but those can also be fixed by their communities. Commented Sep 9, 2016 at 6:56