The Comparison of Consonants in American English and Mandarin Chinese

The Comparison of Phonemes in American English and Mandarin Chinese

Both American English and Mandarin Chinese are universal spoken languages all around the world, and they are quite different in terms of phonemes. The sounds of all languages are divided into consonants and vowels. My goal in this paper is to compare some consonants and vowels in American English and Mandarin Chinese to better understand these two languages. The official phonetic system in China is Hanyu Pinyin. To make English and Chinese phonemes more comparable, I will use International Phonetic Alphabet in the paper.

Consonants are classified according to their place of articulation, manner of articulation, and phonation. American English and Mandarin Chinese share some common consonants. Three pairs of stops in these two languages are the most obvious example. Specifically, /p/ is a voiceless bilabial stop consonant and /t/ is a voiceless alveolar stop consonant in both English and Chinese. These two languages classify pairs of stops into voiced and voiceless ones. However, English and Chinese consonants have more differences. I will discuss some major differences in this paper. In the first place, pairs of stops in Chinese are also divided into aspirated stops and non-aspirated ones while aspiration is a non-distinctive feature in English. For instance, [pʰ] and [p] are allophones of two separate phonemes in Chinese but are allophones of the same phoneme /p/ in English. [pʰo] 波and [po] 坡 have different meanings in Chinese. Second, there are several English consonants do not have counterparts in Chinese and vice versa. Even though some consonants in these two languages sound similar but are still slightly different, including /ʃ/ in English and /ɕ/ in Chinese. Their manner of articulation is fricative and phonation is voiceless. The only difference between the two sounds is the place of articulation. Although they are both post-alveolar, we use the blade of tongue to produce /ʃ/ and the tip...