#Can you tell I'm doing accent and dialect atm lol?

[gayness-and-mayhem]

(Idk if I've posted about this before, but I've just found a little piece of paper that reminded me that I was thinking about it lol). With The Bill, did anyone else notice that Jack had a bit of an accent change? It's not so much that he didn't always have quite a strong northern accent, more that he initially (when he comes on a temporary basis as a DCS) seems to use more words with, for example, the /ʌ/ (strut) vowel rather than the /ʊ/ (foot) vowel (the example I seem to have written down is the word 'butter', idk if he actually ever said that but that's the vowel I mean anyway) that would be typical of his variety. Idk if it was something deliberate that Simon Rouse did just bc he thought it was only ever going to be a temporary role and it fit his expectations of a high ranking police officer, or whether he actually spoke like that at the time but just reverted to how he would naturally speak as time went on and it mattered less, but I just found it really interesting.

[farmerlan]

2/2 Jyl has 2 parts to her name, would she be yanli'er or just li'er? (Her parents call her a-li so idk). Also in reference to wen qing, should they be calling her wen daifu (大夫)? Does the family name come first? Thank you so much again! Atm I'm writing a fic purely for my own entertainment- I have no intention of posting it. But if I ever do, I promise to credit you for helping me understand these things. In the meantime, I just want to learn. 😊❤

Haha OK so I actually went back and rewatched the cliff scene and I think there’s a couple of points to clarify:

1. I don’t think Lan Wangji calls him Wei Ying-er. More on this in the second point, but what you might be hearing is just how the quirks of the Beijing dialect has made its way into mainstream Mandarin. Specifically, in 1955, the People's Republic of China declared that Standard Chinese (Putonghua) was to be "modeled on the pronunciation of Beijing, draws on Northern Chinese as its base dialect, and receives its syntactic norms from exemplary works of vernacular literature" (you can read more about it on wiki here). Basically it’s like the Queen’s English and the reason why they dub the actors’ voices in a lot of shows (including The Untamed) is to dub over the accents of the actors.

The one defining trait of the Beijing accent is ending a lot of their words with ‘-er’. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a trait of the accent, similar to how the California valley girl accent makes every sentence sound like a question because of the ‘lift’ at the end haha (note: this is just within the context of talking about the accent, ‘er’ in itself does have meaning/function when used in other contexts). It’s also not only Beijing – there is a whole Wikipedia article on ‘erization’ within the Mandarin language.

2. The reason why I don’t think LWJ calls him Wei Ying-er is because –er as a diminutive is just typically not used in conjunction with the entire given name, and especially not with the family name. I can’t tell you why, but it just…isn’t. I could be wrong, but I’ve just never heard anyone referred to in that way growing up in China. It just kind of negates the entire reason for using –er as an affectionate diminutive and sounds really odd because it’s like you’re trying to use the full name but then also trying to be cute and informal about it, haha.

Now obviously, this is different if your given name is only one character, like Wen Ning – you would be ‘Ning-er’, but otherwise, you would just choose ONE of the characters of your given name to attach the –er to. So, Li-er, Ying-er etc. but not Wangji-er, Wuxian-er, Lan Zhan-er or any of those combinations.

I will also note that because of the character used for Wei Ying’s given name (婴), Ying-er (婴儿) actually spells out to literally mean ‘infant’ in Chinese. You don’t notice it in English because English is not a logographic language but yeah. It would be kind of like a pun in Chinese lol because you would literally be referring to Wei Ying as an infant.  

3. As to which character to choose… I would say in general the last character of your given name is a safe bet. You can use Li-er for JYL, or Xiao Yan, Yan-er or even A-li. It kind of comes down to personal preference and what ‘flows’ nicely when you say it, but you can definitely use Li-er, it is correct.

4. As for Wen-daifu, it sort of depends on who is doing the addressing! If she’s talking to someone unfamiliar in a doctor-patient relationship, then yes, they would refer to her as Wen-daifu. If she’s just treating Wei Ying, for example, whom she already knows on a personal level, it would be oddly formal for Wei Ying to call her Wen-daifu un-ironically (although he can totally use it in a joking context like how sometimes I would refer to my PhD friend as Dr. X sarcastically haha). Yes, if you’re using a title (as opposed to a dimunitive/nickname), it is used in conjunction with the family name.

Hope that helps! :)))) Have fun fic-writing and I’m happy to help in any way I can！