Re: Sound changes

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 08:33:53PM +0000, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
> >Well, imprisoned or not, we will continue to inflict upon the world our
> >language, which differentiates between aspirated, non-aspirated, voiced,
> >and unvoiced stops, differentiates between nasal and non-nasal vowels, and
> >is TONAL (7 tones, no less!),
>
> Does that mean that you've got four series of stops? Neat, if so. As for
> tones, I'm tone-deaf, and so couldn't care less ... :-)
Yes, although not every syllable is differentiated at all four levels.
Nevertheless, you do have words like:
        [mai]   (low falling) "No", "don't want", etc.
        [bai]   (low rising) "eyebrow"
        [pai]   (low falling) "to worship"
        [p_hai] (low falling) "to send"

I don't know of any [bai] with low falling tone... but then again, I don't
claim to be a literary expert in my L1. :-)

[snip]
> I somehow feel that [tN=] etc are are rather lesser crimes against humanity
> that [N=] by itself.
What about having 7 tones? :-P

> And you still fail to say what your native language actually is!
[snip]

I am deliberately being obnoxious by evading the question. ;-)

OK, OK, it's Hokkien. A contaminated Hokkien, that is. One that has mixed
with local Malaysian languages and picked up some Malay words, some Indian
words, as well as some English words (completely mangled, of course).

In fact, colloquial Hokkien in my hometown nowadays is literally a mixture
of Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin, Indian, and English, not just of the words
but also contradictory bits of borrowed grammar. For example, you have
exclamations like:
        [ja lo:]
where [ja] is borrowed from English "yeah", and [lo:] is a mangled form of
the Malay suffix "-lah" (which has been assimilated for a long time), and
the whole phrase is pronounced with Chinese tones. :-P

And that's not to mention sentences where every other word is in a
different language, with ad hoc phrases constructed according to their
respective source's grammar, but put together with a different grammar.
Only the locals, who have experience with the languages involved, are able
to parse such monsters, because one has to switch from one language to
another several times within one sentence (and who know when to parse
English words with Chinese grammar and when not to).


T

--
Why do you *bug* the compiler all the time?