Re: Sound changes

HS xie3:

>John Cowan wrote:
>  > H. S. Teoh scripsit:
>
>  > Min languages, unlike all the other descendants of Middle Chinese,
>>  never did develop /f/.   Indeed, there are more pre-MC localisms in
>>  the Min group than any other Sinitic language.
>
>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. 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). 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.)) Still, it came in handy when Taiwanese speakers would
overcompensate when speaking Mandarin and plunk f's in where they
didn't belong.

Kou

Reply