1: high level (very high to very high pitch).Cantonese tones (Jyutping romanization, which uses only numbers):.(used with many grammatical words and with endings of many compound words) The first syllable is high rising not low falling.īefore a syllable other than another 3rd tone b However, 你好 ‘hello’ is written ni3hao3 but pronounced as ni 2hao3. Thus, 你 ‘you’ is written ni3 in Hanyu Pinyin romanization and also pronounced in isolation as ni3. bA 3rd-tone syllable before another 3rd-tone syllable shifts to 2nd tone.a This site uses tone numbers instead of vowel marks because computers don’t always properly display letters with the macron and caron and only certain fonts will even render them.Within this individual range, there are pitch contours of staying level, going up, and going down in pitch, as the following table shows: Mandarin Tones Tone Name The range of the pitches is relative to the very highest and very lowest pitch of each speaker’s normal speaking voice. Ma5: ‘’ from dong3 ma5 ‘understand?’ (“The Train Job,” “Out of Gas,” “The Message,” “Heart of Gold”).Ma3: ‘horse’ from ma3shang4 ‘right away’ (literally: ‘on horseback’ “Safe”).Ma1: ‘mother’ from wo3 de5 ma1! ‘my God!’ (literally: ‘my mother!’ “Bushwhacked,” “The Message”).Numerals in Chinese words (e.g., ni 3hao 3 ‘hello’) represent Chinese tones.Įvery syllable of every word in tonal languages like Mandarin have pitch patterns that are part of the correct pronunciation and that contrast with other words that have the same consonant and vowel sounds but different tones, such as The Japanese is in the Hepburn romanization system, common in textbooks for learners of Japanese. The Cantonese on this site is in the Jyutping romanization system devised and promoted by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.Therefore, I was stuck having to sound out the words and coming up with something phonetic. I didn’t have the luxury of teaching pinyin, nor did they have the luxury to learn it. Jenny Lynn, the post-pilot translator, explained:
#Serenity symbol chinese movie
Firefly (and the later movie Serenity), except for the pilot episode, used a made-up phonetic system for the scripts (e.g. (Jenny Lynn, questionnaire answer in E-mail attachment to author, November 11, 2004)įor writing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet (romanization), this site uses Hanyu Pinyin romanization, the standard of Mainland China and more recently of Taiwan as well. On Firefly, they were working in a vacuum with no feedback and aside from a non–Chinese-speaking script supervisor, there was no one to correct them on tones or pronunciation. I think the fans will notice their vast improvement from small to big screen. As I’ve learned from actually coaching the cast on the feature film Serenity, each and every one of our core cast members has a great, musical ear and they’re pretty diligent about learning their lines. And for anyone who knows anything about the intricacies of Mandarin, it’s hard for a novice to know whether or not you’re saying things correctly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to set to supervise or coach. On the tapes, I’d say the Chinese line at conversational speed, say it three times slowly, then again at conversational speed. Translator Jenny Lynn pointed out the limitations of the learning process: Even so, the Chinese pronunciations aren’t native. The pronunciations of the actors are sometimes Taiwan Mandarin instead of Modern Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) ( see below: (2) Are the actors speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, or some other variety of Chinese?).
Pip for helping me find unpublished versions of the Firefly scripts in 2003.Jenny Lynn for answering my questions in 2004.Firefly– Serenity Chinese translator Jenny Lynn graciously answered some questions (before any scripts were published) to fill in some gaps in the Firefly part, but she hasn’t verified the accuracy of this site as a whole.įei1chang2 gan3xie4 非常感谢 (thank you very much) to For this unofficial site, I’ve used Chinese dictionaries, the DVDs, and the published scripts and comic books. Page Sections: Disclaimer & Thanks | Site Entries | Frequently Asked Questions | Search: Disclaimer & Thanks
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