How should one pronounce "'pu erh"? Are there variations, or am I just hearing people get it wrong? I'm a bit clueless myself.
Thanks in advance; love the forum.
Aug 29th, '06, 17:18
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klemptor
Aug 31st, '06, 00:23
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bearsbearsbears
"poo-air" isn't quite right, either, because it's not the "eh" sound of "air," it's like "uh" except it's "uhr" = pu-uhr...if this board was in a unicode font, I'd write it out for you in IPA. It's unaspirated /p/ and long /u/ in [pu] and a syllabic retroflex /r/ in [r]. looks like [pu.r], with the appropriate tones (which I don't know).majalise wrote:Someone just told me to say it as "poor you." This sounds odd to me and I see no one else came up with that one.
Ah, the power of internet!
Thanks folks
The dash in pu-erh and the apostrophe in pu'er signify the vowel and syllable break, to prevent it being pronounced as the monosyllabic [pwehr]
Re: Pronunciation?
Hey puerhking - thanks very much
...that cleared up a long standing debate I had with my friend..
And yeah shogun89, it's quite interesting to see that a 3 year old thread was brought back to life...

And yeah shogun89, it's quite interesting to see that a 3 year old thread was brought back to life...

Aug 15th, '09, 12:44
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Re: Pronunciation?
Thanks, Drumhum, for reminding us about these pronunciations on TeaSpring. I keep forgetting about them and they are such a wonderful resource for all tea types.
Re: Pronunciation?
The proper pronunciation of these words baffles me...and I'm Chinese! FWIW, I speak a village Cantonese dialect- don't ask me what it is, but it's very common in China. Anyways, I'm just learning about teas so I've started to ask my mom about some of these words. In our dialect, pu'erh is pronounced poo-nay. Don't ask me where the 'n' comes from. A lot of Chinese/English translations are incorrect (according to my dialect). For example Feng Shui is often pronounced fung shway, but should be foong sooey. Ti Kuan or Ti Guan is heet gwon.