Re: Sound changes

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.

> 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.)

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague."  --Edsger Dijkstra

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