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Chinese characters in jpns and chns

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Qinshi
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 5757 days ago

115 posts - 183 votes 
Speaks: Vietnamese*, English
Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 65 of 70
18 July 2010 at 10:20am | IP Logged 
Wow it seems 客家 Hakka retains the old 'ng' initials. This also is the case in Vietnamese which distinguishes both 'ng' and 'nh'. 'Ng' is /ŋ/ like Middle Chinese 'ng' and 'nh' is pronounced /ɲ/ like the Middle Chinese 'nj'.

Character - Middle Chinese - Mandarin - Cantonese - Hakka - Vietnamese - Korean - Japanese
日 - njit - ri4 - jat6 - ngit - nhật - il - nitsu
月 - ngiuæt - yue4 - jyut6 - ngiet - nguyệt - weol - getsu
肉 - njiuk - rou4 - juk6 - ngiuk - nhục - yuk - niku
耳 - njiə̌ - er3 - ji5 - ngi - nhĩ - i - ji

From examination, it seems Hakka and Vietnamese preserve the Middle Chinese sounds best. Then followed by Cantonese, then Japanese, Korean and finally Mandarin!

Another character that struck me was 物, which is: wu4 - mat6 - vut - vật - mul - butsu. I wonder what the Middle Chinese reading of it was?

Edited by Qinshi on 18 July 2010 at 10:29am

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Captain Haddock
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
kanjicabinet.tumblr.
Joined 6772 days ago

2282 posts - 2814 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek

 
 Message 66 of 70
18 July 2010 at 10:54am | IP Logged 
Qinshi wrote:
Another character that struck me was 物, which is: wu4 - mat6 - vut - vật - mul - butsu. I wonder
what the Middle Chinese reading of it was?


"butsu" is its kan-on (Tang dynasty) reading in Japanese, but the older go-on reading is "motsu".
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Adamdm
Groupie
Australia
Joined 5441 days ago

62 posts - 89 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 68 of 70
20 July 2010 at 2:40am | IP Logged 
pkany wrote:
The influence of Hakka pronunciation can even found in Tai-Kadai languages. But this book is ridiculous. They put Mandarin pinyin which looks nothing like OC and MC. From here, you can see the harm of Mandarin promotion policy . If you were a reader of that book, you didn't understand why Chinese languages are related to Tai-Kudai just by looking at the pinyin.


pkany - you've given us lots of very interesting material!

What is that book that you excerpted from (that you say is ridiculous)?

Pinyin:

When I started learning Chinese, I resisted learning pinyin, for several reasons - one being that my wife is Taiwanese, and in that country the main Romanization scheme is (or at least was) Wade-Giles, which certainly transcribes Mandarin sounds better than (a naive English person reading) pinyin does. I believe that the inventors of pinyin probably made a deliberate political decision to use sound-letter correspondences that were not completely consistent with _any_ European language.

Anyway, pinyin now seems inescapable, unfortunately. Of course it was undeniably politics which precluded the PRC using the bo-po-mo-fo system, which seems to me to be perfectly good as a phonetic writing method. I decided not to try to learn this, as I thought it would have been like trying to learn yet another language. However, it probably is not more difficult than Japanese kana, which I have now mostly got my head around.

Various Chinese languages:

Is Hokkien the same as Min Nan?

How different are Southern and Northern Min? I know from two of my acquaintances (one from the one part of Fujian, and one from the other) that they are aurally mutually incomprehensible, but perhaps this is not so to for someone like yourself who has studied various Chineses.

Language relationships:

What are your own opinions about relationships of South-East Asian Languages? I believe that the current orthodoxy is that Burmese is in the same family as Chinese, while Thai (together with Khmer and Lao) are in another, and Vietnamese is in yet another again.
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Adamdm
Groupie
Australia
Joined 5441 days ago

62 posts - 89 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 70 of 70
26 July 2010 at 7:05am | IP Logged 
pkany wrote:
Pinyin: Do you know that nowadays Taiwanese mingle bopomofo when they chat online and write blogs? When you watch their TV shows, you will see so many bopomofo. It is not that hard. Learn it for your wifey!


Very interesting! When I started learning, my [then] girlfriend said that bopomofo was only used for elemntary teaching of young children. This in fact may have been the case then - about 15 years ago - as the 万维网 had only just started. Nice example of language evolution, if this is so.

I've put bopomofo on my list of things to learn - one good reason for this being that, currently, I only know how to imput gen-ti using pinyin, although the writing that I am maingly concentrating on is fan-ti. I've had the Taiwan input method installed on my computer for a long time, but not used it.

Quote:
"lo" 佬 in Cantonese means low-class man. At the end, Cantonese call everybody "lo" 佬- "鶴佬"Hok lo, "客家佬" Hakka lo, 北佬 Bak lo (Northerner), 鬼佬Gwai lo (Ghost man, foreigner).


是么的! - had you not told me this, I would have assuemd that 佬 was just a varint of 老.




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