Phonetic Research On Dao County Mandarin In Hunan Province

Located in Hunan province, Dao county is part of Yongzhou city. It is north toShuangpai county, east to Ningyuan county, south to Jiangyong county, which are withinYongzhou City, and its neighbor on the west are Guanyang county, Quanzhou county inGuangxi province. With a long history, Dao county is called Daozhou in the past. The typesand distribution of dialects in Dao county are complex, and most residents here can speakbidialct. The people within southeastern county including the downtown, Gongba town,Simaqiao town, Baimadu town and so on speak Dao county mandarin. Based on LanguageAtlas of China, Dao county mandarin is belongs to the part of xiangnan dialect in southeastmandarin and it can be used in communication within the county. Besides, the people in westnorth northwest southwest there mainly speak patois, and they use patois to communicatewith natives, using Dao county mardarin to communicate with others. Daojiang town dialectis taken granted as the representative of Dao county mandarin.In the past, about Dao dialect research, scholars pay more attention to Dao local dialectrather than Dao Mandarin, specially lacking in Project Research. At present, most of therecords about Dao Mandarin are age-old and not complete. So it is necessary to make ageneral research on phonetic system of Dao Mandarin, replenish some former research andprobe into the divergence.By field survey and monosyllabic tone experiment, we find that there are seventeenInitials including zero initial, thirty-five finals, four categery in tones which are yinping33,yangping41, shangsheng45, qusheng41. We try to use phonetic collocation table andHomophone table to manifest the phonetic system of Dao county mandarin.Compared with phonology of mediaeval Chinese, there are eight features of the initialconsonants, seven features of the vowels, four features of the tones in dao county mandarin.For example, from the initial consonants it is hard to distinguish tow consonants “n” and “l”for local people, and it rarely pronounce the consonant “f” in Dao county mandarin speakers.Take the tones as another example, voiced sound should be read as qusheng, and two types ofqusheng in medieval Chinese become one type.After making a compare on phonology among Dao Mandarin (belong to Xiangnansection), Xinan Mandarin,Chenyu section (Chendu Dialect),Wutian section (WuhanDialect),Changhe section (Changde Dialect) and Ningyuan Mandarin (located in the north ofDao County),we found that on one hand, Dao Mandarin has the general characteristics, ofXinan Mandarin phonetics, such as having difficulty in distinguish tow consonants “n” and“l” for local people, voiced sound reading as qusheng. On other hand, Dao mandarin has itsown phonetic characteristics. The difference between Dao Mandarin and the southwestMandarin is that yangping and yingping both are high tones in Dao mandarin and the formeris pronounced in high falling tone, the latter is high rising.