Re: Sound changes

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 04:00:35PM -0400, Douglas Koller, Latin & French wrote:
[snip]
> >Interesting. I have noticed, from my own observations, that the Hokkien
> >/h/ is usually /f/ in Mandarin.
>
> It ain't necessarily so. As a very broad generalization, it works,
> but there's "hue2", "fire", Mandarin "huo3", and bazillions other
> counterexamples.
True, true. That's why I said "usually". :-) Although that perhaps is even
too broad a generalization...

Another thing, though. I've been noticing recently among my mainland
Chinese acquiantances that /h/ is sometimes realized as something between
[h] and [x]. The similarity to [x] is really bizarre to me, since I'm used
to them being distinct phonemes, but I notice it from time to time.

> Me, I honed my Chinese skills in Nanchang, Jiangxi,
> where Mandarin h's were normally realized as f's in the local dialect
> ("hong2", "red", becomes "feng2", etc.) (and let's not even get into
> the "n" vs. "l" thing).
Ever heard a Northern Chinese (try to) speak Mandarin? :-) You get all
kinds of funny manglings like that all the time. :-P

But it's interesting you mention "n" vs. "l". The [nN=2] in mainland
Hokkien has become in my dialect, of all things, [la:N] (low rising, I
forgot the tone numbers... again). So the famous Hokkien phrase
[ka.ki.nN=2] becomes [kakilaN], and sounds really different from the
original because for some odd reason, tone 2 here becomes low rising.

(Because of the odd tone shift, I suspect [la:N] is actually a borrowing
from the local Malay _orang_, "man", which local Hokkien speakers like to
deride as [A: laN] (black man). But I could be wrong, of course.)

> Though my Chinese has restandardized somewhat
> since the mainland years, I still lapse into this speech pattern,
> particularly after a couple of tootskies (native speakers still
> deride me for this: "Where'd you learn to talk like that?! You sound
> like such a hick." (Ni jiang de hao tu. Ni de fayin zhen bu biaozhun.
> etc., etc.))
[snip]

LOL... I presume [tu] here is [t_hu]? That's quite an insult. It means
"primitive", "uncultured", "aboriginal" (in the stereotypical negative
sense).


T

--
It is of the new things that men tire -- of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It
is the old things that are young. -- G.K. Chesterton

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