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Re: Sound changes

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 27, 2002, 16:43
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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H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>