Re: tonal languages
| From: | H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, January 15, 2003, 22:01 |
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On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 04:46:47PM -0500, Douglas Koller, Latin & French wrote:
[snip]
> >/teng3/ here, sandhied from /teng5/, means "long". (Or it could be
> >something else, I'm not 100% sure.)
>
> Actually, it's Mandarin "tang2" as in Tang Dynasty "tang". "sua~1" is
> indeed "mountain". Tang Mountain was a name used by (older)
> (pre-liberation?) Taiwanese and "Hua2qiao2" (overseas Chinese) to
> refer to China.
[snip]
Aha. That sounds more plausible, considering that in Hokkien we refer to
the Chinese people as /teng3 lang5/. :-) Gotta love those archaic
allophones. Trust a native speaker to *totally* misidentify etymologies.
:-)
T
--
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte