Re: Sound changes

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 12:40:20PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> H. S. Teoh scripsit:
>
> > "Hokkien" is transliterated from how natives pronounce the name;
>
> 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.

> > And of course, manglings like "Fukienese" is just an anglicization
> > of the Mandarin pronunciation of a Hokkien name. :-P
>
> No, it's just pre-sound-shift Mandarin, the same that gives us
> "Peking", before velar stops became palatal affricates.
> (A lot of these names were written down in the 18th century, just
> before the sound change became universal.)
[snip]

That's interesting. In less than 200 years that much has changed. Today,
the variant of Hokkien spoken in my hometown is already showing radical
differences with its ancestor. I wonder if it will soon become mutually
unintelligible with mainland Hokkien or Taiwanese. (Some of my cousins,
who are less fluent in Hokkien, are already saying that they can't
understand Taiwanese at all, or even the (less divergent) Hokkien spoken
on the other side of the country.)

*Wonders about Ebisedian sound changes...*


T

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

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