The Phonetic And Lexical Research On Yutai County Dialects

There has been no research systematically conducted on the dialect of Yutai(a county in Jining, Shandong Province) ever since the book Yutai annals on dialects(1997) was published. Even in Qian Zengyi’s book, Dialects of Different Areas in Shandong Province(manuscript), it has not been mentioned. According to the dialect principles of setting investigation spot in each county, this essay inspects the phonology and vocabulary of Yutai dialect in order to provide some materials for the research of Shandong dialects.For the part of phonology, the essay straightens out the historical origin of Yutai dialect’s sound, rhyme and intonation based on description, meanwhile, it probes into the matching rules of the sound, rhyme and intonation and the rules of phonetic changes.Yutai dialect is a phonetic system that consists of 20 initial consonants, 38 vowels of the Chinese syllable and 4 tones. Slightly different from the phonetic system of mandarin, its initial consonants do not include the 3 retroflex ts,tsh and s.Mandarin’s z is z in Yutai dialect, and there is a new velar, sonant and fricative y.Except these, the left 17 initial consonants and the only one zero initial are the same as the consonants of mandarin. About the vowels, mandarin’s (?)and (?)are turned into (?)in Yutai dialect, mandarin’s au and iau into (?) and i(?), the o and uo into γ and uγ, the γinto (?), the iε into iε and (?) and the ou and iou into au and iau, besides, mandarin’s vowels whose rhyme tail is n are all nasalized, the vowels whose tail is η are not changed except u(?)η vanishes. Moreover, mandarin’s 39 vowels are turned into 38 vowels. Similar to the tones of mandarin, Yutai dialect’s tones are also categorized into 4 tone types: level tone, rising tone, falling-rising tone and falling tone, but their tone pitch is different, Yutai dialect is expressed by five-degree labeling method,which is level tone213, rising tone52, falling-rising tone55 and falling tone512.During the investigation, it can be found that the nasalized vowels with Professor Zhang Guangyu’s regulation, the second category of nasalization means the vowel groups of -an and-an are all nasalized, while the groups of -aη and -(?)η are not. In terms of the nasalized movement regulation of vn→v→v,it is estimated that the - aηand -(?)η vowel groups will continue to be nasalized, and according to the principle that the first one to be nasalized being the first one to vanish, those nasalized vowels in Yutai dialect will evolve into single vowels gradually.As for vocabulary, it is investigated that Yutai dialect has 4656 vocabularies, in which there are 556 monosyllables accounting for about 12 percent of the whole vocabularies, 2811 disyllables accounting for about 60 percent, 1046 trisyllables accounting for about 22 percent, 194 quadrisyllables for about 4 percent and quinquesyllabels and others for only about 1 percent.Besides, these vocabularies are researched from 2 aspects: morphology and parts of speech. We found that Yutai dialect has relatively abundant vocabularies, in which the prefixes such as ban(般), beng(蹦), ti(踢) and jiao(焦), infixes such as li(里), er(而),bu(不)and a(巴)and suffixes such as la(拉),cha(叉),hu(乎)and lou(喽)possess the characteristics of Yutai; in addition, the lively forms of its adjectives also have local features. Besides using methods of repeatedly overlaying affixes and adding affixes when people say the degree of something is deepening, they often use the quantifier dian’er(点儿 means a small amount) and the adverbs like ting(挺),hen(很),tei(忒),geng(更),zui(最),ke(可),(死),zhen(真),lao(老),X zhe lai(X着来)and so on.We also found that intergenerational distinction exists obviously on personal pronoun usage among the old, the middle-aged and the young. Taking the use of father for an example, the old call their fathers dada(大大), the middle-aged call die(爹),while the young call baba(爸爸). Roughly three reasons cause this phenomenon:family education, school education and social education. These three interact with and influence each other, thus forming this phenomenon. Expanding this issue to common nouns, the intergenerational distinction in the usage of vocabularies is ubiquitous.There are something that young peoplemind hard to be accessible have stepped down from the stage of history with higher social living standard. At the same time, advanced information technology greatly reduces the cost of information diffusion, the popularization of mandarin makes it in a powerful position, and the metabolism rate of vocabularies is increasing,all these factors have promoted the formation of dialect vocabularies’intergenerational distinction. Young people like using network languages and mandarin instead of old appellation, aged people still use old appellation,while whether the middle-aged use the new or the old appellation depends on who they are talking with. Therefore, intergenerational distinction is created.