Discussion On Vowels Boundaries Of Modern Chinese In View Of Emic

Vowel is the most resounding and most important phoneme amongModern Chinese syllable. As a kind of measurable objective existence,though the number of the phonemes is huge, the valuable phonemes ofthe specific language are limited in specific languages. Therefore, puttingaside the physical attributes, many scholars merge the phonemes intopattern sounds from the aspect of the social attribute. However, since thecriterion of the vowel classification has something to do with the modernChinese users’ subjective perception, the classification standard is not thesame at all. From the language user’s perspective, we segment the vowelsof Modern Chinese in the view of emic, leading to an understanding ofthe speech sounds boundaries of which phonemes Chinese users canpercept, and the speech sounds boundaries of which ones Chinese userscannot perceive or ignore the quality differences subjectively. The vowels with clear boundary are always opposed to be different vowels byChinese users while the vowels with ambiguous boundary are regarded asone vowel that has similar pronunciation and can be replaced withoutaffecting the language communication. According to the analysis on theChinese users’ phonological distinction and the speech meaningopposition of the difference, this paper get a conclusion that modernChinese vowel system is essentially a vowel system composed of sixvowels:/i y u e o a/.This paper does some research on the phoneme induction and makesome analysis on Modern Chinese vowels from etic perspective. We alsomake some analysis on the subjective definition of the modern Chinesevowels through the rhymes of modern poetry and pop songs, the vowelscorrespond in the foreign words and harmonious tone words. Finally weget clear about controversy existing in the phonemic classification andmake an induction on the modern Chinese vowel system. In the end, wewill point out the problems not solved during the research.