Even more pain from the fact that I’ve updated this old blogroll and you’re still not there!

I don’t remember when I started reading FoundinChina regularly, but it’s been in my reader for a while. I’ve been thinking of a blogroll update sometime in early ‘09, so look for that.

In the meantime, I’m honored and humbled to be blogrolled at FIC, especially because it was (as I dig into the records) specifically because of the Qomolangma incident, which never fails to make me chortle.

That said, it’s hard to disagree with your assessment in relation to the sites listed above, both in terms of category and quality. Rest assured, bjshengr will remain on my blogroll

But I still think you are “confusing the remedy for a problem with its cause” — a quote from this text on Pinyin.info, and that it is precisely the characters that force people into a self-perpetrating cycle of writing stuff that is ambiguous if spoken.

Not that I think abandonment of characters would necessarily be easy or helpful at this point. Zev Handel has helped convince me (see some discussion on this pinyin.info post) that there are some really deep-rooted monsters in that idea. And not that it matters what I think! But I still think there’s a lot of confusion about cause and effect.

@Claw — I’m in total agreement that there are lots of flavors of Mandarin, and that’s why I don’t see this as an open & shut case of Zhonglish. Still, since most of the rest of the speech seems fairly standard putonghua-ish, I think it’s likely that the tone sandhi I singled out are more likely to be non-native speaker errors. Some kind of consistency (even if it’s non-standard) would argue for a native speaker of a different dialect of Mandarin, don’t you think? But if I find someone who says he sounds exactly like a person from X, I might have to change my tune.

But in defense of the Chinese, I think that’s sorta true all over. Even Americans, quite accustomed to foreigners who speak English well, might be surprised to find an intermediate speaker with signs of, say, a Texan accent.

So, I don’t think this is really a case of Zhonglish; perhaps he’s a native speaker of another Chinese variety though.

This is why, as Randy noted, that when preceding a classifier, you use the -ei pronuncation, because a number generally precedes a classifier. [Technically speaking, both pronunciations are acceptable before a classifier because the number is optional when it is equal to one (e.g., 我有一本书 vs. 我有本书), though the -ei pronunciation appears to be more popular for this case anyway.]

Applying the logic above, the sentence, “哪是我的？” can only be pronounced “nǎ shi wǒ de?” because replacing 哪 with 哪一 in this case would make the sentence ungrammatical.