晕 in 头晕 is yūn first tone but in 晕车 yùn fourth tone. I am fine with that but is there any rule around this or just something that you just learn and go on with? The normal tone changes I do know but this one i have just learnt by heart and not until now actually started to think about. Is it about different meanings maybe? tóuyūn is dizzy while yùnchē is carsick.

There are several characters like this. Similar meanings, same phoneme, different tone. 待，应，处 are three common examples.

Are there rules governing their tone pronunciation? I don't know of any. I look for semantic clues and learn the words one-by-one as they come up in context.

My advice: Learn the standard tones, but don't get too hung on it. Even your Chinese friends won't always agree on words like this.

现代汉语词典 puts it this way:

晕 1 yūn（1）同‘晕’（yùn）①，用于‘头晕、晕头晕脑、晕头转向’等。（2）昏迷：～倒｜～厥。另见yùn。

晕 2 yùn（1）头脑发昏，周围物体好象在旋转，人有要跌倒的感觉：～船｜眼～｜他一坐汽车就～。（3）日光或月光通过云层中的冰晶时经折射而形成的光圈。参看〖日晕〗、〖月晕〗。另见yūn。

I have noticed this and that is why I try to find any sort of rule that I can store it with. Well, I have learnt them by listening to them before so now when i also need to write them I just start to think about those stupid things:-) My wife keep telling me to stop to try to find any sense in it and just shuffle it in. To bad that my brain do not work that way.

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Agree om that, that is why I have always done but today by some reason my mind tried to find logic that isn't there :-) Hm, guess to many hours with computer code makes you feel that everything has to be logical. But if we compare a few tones for a few character with all the different possible readings there are for most Japanese Kanji, then I am still very happy. Kanji can from time to time drive me crazy.

@mandarinboy why is it that in English we are "in the car" but "on the bus"? Why is it that the "ough" suffix can sound like "uff", "owe", "ow", or "aw" as in "tough", "though", "though", and "thought"?

Don't ask why! That's just how it is and there's simply no logic to it. The only way you will ever get past this kind of thing is to memorize all the variations, ideally in plenty of context so you can quickly remember which one to use in which context.

James

The second "though" has "ow" as a vowel? Maybe in Britain? "Bough" here. And you missed "oo" in "through", "off" in "cough", and "oh" in "thorough":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

Apparently there was logic for it--they all used to sound the same, but then we stopped saying the /x/ sound that they had and the words ran for cover under whatever nearby vowel sounds they could find.

That's usually the pattern with things that don't make sense in languages--"well, they USED to..."

Whoops, missed one, wanted to put "bough" in there.

Nick and James' comments had me thinking. I want to expand on what I said above...

English orthography (and related to that, pronunciation) is notoriously difficult for learners of the language to understand. And not just for beginners. Through its elementary and intermediate levels, English simply has too many words and spelling conventions for the brain to easily handle.

As Nick said above, there are reasons for this. Linguistics can help us uncover these reasons and track changes in the language over time. Some of the reasons are not strictly linguistic. They are also political--and more pointedly, colonial. If the sun never set on the British Empire, neither did it set on the English language borrowing from other languages forced into her servitude.

Which is to say, that among the major languages in the Western world, English is without question the most whorish. Nowhere is this more clear than in her vocabulary and orthography. To make the point succinctly, and with humor:

The idea of holding a spelling bee in Spanish is laughable. There could never be declared a winner, because the contest would never end.

But English orthography--whatever the feelings of various learners on the subject--is not random. There are historical, sociolinguistic reasons why we spell the words the way we do. And although we may not be consciously aware of them, we are nevertheless constantly relying on outstanding linguistic categories. This is why (think about it) we only rarely come across words whose spelling is too hard to make sense of.

So:

"octopus" pluralizes to "octopi". This must appear random to most foreign learners of the language. The native English speaker accepts it as a matter of course. And when the native English speaker hears that the "focus," "stimulus," "cactus" and "radius" pluralize to "foci", "stimuli", "cacti" and "radii," she may think these words sound weird (as I do), but at least she can make sense of this and accept it.

A native English speaker incorporates these variations and peculiarities according to established linguistic categories in her mind. What does the foreign language learner do? Since he is lacking these categories? He has no choice but do memorize the variations and peculiarities, with brute force, one-by-one.

Another example. I was told growing up that "i" comes before "e" except after "c". But. Not really.

[feign, conscience, veil, weird, eight, feisty, seize, freight, beige, science, vein, heifer, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum...]

To native English speakers this isn't much more than a curiosity of the language. It doesn't slow us down much. To foreigners, this is an orthographical nightmare.

So. Are there rules governing 晕，待，处，应，regarding what tones these characters take and when? None that I know of. Are there conventions that a native Chinese speaker would know subconsciously, that would keep him from worrying over questions like this? Yes. Are we, at our present state of learning, aware of these conventions? No.

And so we memorize.

Actually, the plural of "octopus" should not be "octopi" because it is not a Latin word! It comes from the Greek for "eight feet", "octo" and "pos". That means that its plural is either "octopodes" (if you want to rock it in pseudo-Greek) or "octopuses".

Nowadays many people use "octopi" out of a mistaken belief that "octopus" is Latin, which makes "octopi" an acceptable variant in many dictionaries simply because enough people use it. ;)

James

James, except that linguistic rules are ultimately governed by usage, not provenance.

Anyway I thought it was Latin too! I stand corrected :-)

I thought it was octopodae?

I just looked, and my newish dictionary says octopuses. My older (? 50 years) says octopodae or octopi.

That's the trouble with dictionaries, they do insist on telling it like it is, instead of how it should be.

Rachael.

I'd never heard of "octopodae". Apparently the OED says 'Plural octopuses, octopi, (rare) octopodes Brit.' but I don't have a subscription so I can't confirm that.

Here's a question. What do you call the piece of cloth that you tie around you when you cook to protect your clothes? It's "apron", right? Wrong! It's a "napron"! "Apron" came about because people were confused by "a napron" and thought it was "an apron" and around the 15th century it switched to "apron", which was surely tsk-tsked at the time. So, in the long run, language is dictated purely by social factors and usage rather than abstract rules.

There was a great Sylvester Stallone movie, "Demolition Man", where the hero was frozen and re-animated something like 50 years into the future. Taco Bell had turned into a chain of snooty fine-dining restaurants and people thought it was cute that Stallone said "ask" instead of "aks".

James

Actually, I usually say pinny (from pinafore).

A napron ! that's a good one.

Similarly, my kids tell me that an adder (snake) was originally a nadder. There's probably a technical term for that kind of change.

Mostly I can go with the flow on language change, but there are a few I hate. I won't allow my children to use "hopefully" in the modern usage ("hopefully" has to be an adverb, because that is what the suffix -fully is for), and I won't accept "me!" as the answer to "who wants a sweetie?". I thought hard about that one: I can't send the poor things out into the world saying "I!" in that context, it would sound too weird. I compromised on "I do".

I'm saddened by the loss of "whom" from the spoken word (and a lot of the written text as well), but it is so far gone I don't nag my kids about it. I have explained it once or twice (when they ask).

Do you have the comedians Mitchell and Webb on your side of the pond? They did a great sketch on language use, and hit about a dozen of my bugbears.

Worst of all has to be pretentious use of long words where a short one would be better. Nobody should ever use "methodology" as a noun unless they can explain the difference between a methodology and a method.

Rant over.

I do love language. I still cannot imagine ever knowing enough of a second language to think about the nuances and niceties in it.

Rachael.

@jww1066 This is completely non-language related. "Great" Sylvester Stallone move? I have heard that movie called many things, you can even say it is a fun, silly little movie. I am more than willing to admit to liking it. I have never heard it called "great: before, though. (Joking)

Bah. Looking at the typos in that post is exactly why sometimes I want an edit function.

Yeah it's called "metanalysis" according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanalysis

I'd never heard of Mitchell and Webb, but then again I'm an old fogy without a TV so maybe the youngsters know all about them.

One fun thing to do if you're learning a second language is listen for grammatical errors that are commonly committed by young people speaking that language (according to the older generation) and start correcting them when you hear them slip up. To make fun of me, my (Venezuelan) wife often tells the story of the time we were in line in an amusement park and a little girl who was behind us said "Mami, ¡dame la mapa¡" ("Mommy, give me the map!") So I turned my head and said "EL mapa"... ;)

James

@west316 Oh, I loved it and have referenced it for years. The writing was genius. OK, maybe I was being a little tongue-in-cheek.

Demolition Man was significantly awesome, I will agree. Thanks for the metanalysis link--that's a great read!

@Rachael

My mother is a bit of a language lover as well, so upon an occasion we talk about the comments made on this website. My mother is deeply saddened for your loss of whom. She implores you not to give up the fight for that word. It is too important of a word. The world needs well spoken children.