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《富顺方言》has an entry that reads:

【轧】
读音：ōā（连读）
释义：碾压，轧扎。
举例：1、小心车子轧斗人！
2、有一道菜叫“轧海椒”，下饭安逸得板。

The thing that is confusing me is the:

读音：ōā（连读）

I've checked in the actual print edition of the book and actually it seems that the Kindle edition gives more information the book only prints:

读音：oa（连读）

without any diacritics.

What would ōā（连读） even sound like? It seems more likely to be a mistake than anything else. Any ideas on the pronunciation of "轧" in 富顺(县)?

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  • 1
    Assuming it's not a mistake, I would presume that ōā is close to or a corruption of something that sounds like 挖. 軋 is constructed as 烏黠切 in 廣韻, leading to this array of possible modern pronunciations. If you then search up dialectical information on something like 挖, you get dialectical Rominsations like wa, va, ua, and oa.
    – dROOOze
    Jul 29, 2019 at 6:16
  • @droooze I was thinking soft "w" + "a" would make more sense. 我 sometimes just gets written "o" by people who are really soft with their double-u's.
    – Mou某 ♦
    Jul 29, 2019 at 6:22
  • Well, that's assuming that the print is a mistake :)
    – dROOOze
    Jul 29, 2019 at 6:23
  • If you asked me to pronounce "ōā (連讀)", I would start off with a glottal stop. An initial 'o' does not sound like an initial 'w' at all, if these guys pay strict attention to orthography.
    – dROOOze
    Jul 29, 2019 at 6:26
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    @Michaelyus This has further confused things: 【阿垰】读音：oākā
    – Mou某 ♦
    Jul 29, 2019 at 11:51

2 Answers 2

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A tentative hypothesis:

It seems like there is a 挖 vs 蛙 split, which the dictionary has tried to notate. There is some kind of difference between the /w/ of 挖 and /ʋ/ of 蛙.

The fortition of /w/ to [ʋ] is attested across all of northern Mandarin, and is particularly prevalent in Beijing and the Northeast. This dictionary seems to suggest that this process is incomplete.

I think that the pinyin orthography used by the book has "w" representing /ʋ/, and the "o" representing /w/ instead.

My evidence for this is 娃儿 being transcribed as "wáer (连读)" whilst still having 轧 as "ōā (连读)" in the dictionary.

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  • I believe the correct pronunciation is: [ŋa⁵⁵], but I'm not sure why /ŋ/ is notated ō. If people are being lazy it's totally expected that [ŋa] would transform into [a](?).
    – Mou某 ♦
    Oct 31, 2019 at 6:23
  • @user3306356 Thanks for your fieldwork! Actually, if it was originally /ŋ/, then moving to /w/ is entirely expected; it's what happened between Late Middle Chinese and Mandarin (e.g. 我 and 五) and currently happening in Cantonese.
    – Michaelyus
    Oct 31, 2019 at 10:05
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軋 is actually has 2 pronunciations based on the meaning.
For this case(輾壓, rolling or flattening out) should pronounced as "yà", like the first syllable of word "yard".
For another meaning like "聚集"(gathering) or "借調"(secondment), should pronounced as "gá", like the first syllable of word "gallon".

Check this: Traditional version or Simplified version

I'm native Chinese speaker, living in Taiwan currently.

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3
  • Uh, I don’t believe you read the question very closely.
    – Mou某 ♦
    Jul 29, 2019 at 9:29
  • Maybe ōā belongs to the dialect of somewhere mainland China, but based on the meaning in the example, pronounced as yà should not be wrong. OR ōā = yà?(Sorry I don't know the notation explicitly of the upper bar of the ō and ā)
    – Conifers
    Jul 29, 2019 at 10:08
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    這問題是關于富順方言，不是國語
    – dROOOze
    Jul 29, 2019 at 10:33

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