Re: About Hebrew Emphatics

From: "Nik Taylor" <yonjuuni@...>

> Danny Wier wrote:
> *Voiced* aspirates?  I didn't realize Chinese ever had those kinds of
> sounds.
T'ang Dynasty Chinese did. It had voiceless plain, voiceless aspirate and
voiced aspirate stops and affricates, so there were triads of ph/p/bh,
th/t/dh, tsh/ts/dz etc. Old Chinese (reconstructed of course) apparently had
unaspirated voiced as well. In Mandarin, tone 2 (rising) usually corresponds
to former voiced aspirates.

Some modern Chinese languages like Taiwanese have these triads, but usually
as ph/p/b, etc. Cantonese and Taiwanese (as do Sino-Korean and
Sino-Japanese/On) keep the old syllable-final stops, all lost in Mandarin;
syllable-final /m/ is also preserved, not converted to /n/ as in Mandarin.

> Presumably.  Both Korean and Japanese have a considerable
> Chinese-derived vocabulary, which often shows some interesting sound
> changes, like Japanese ryou, Korean yang.  Other than /j/, the sound
> changes have caused no shared phones between the two.  :-)  The original
> form was something like *ryang, Korean has a /r/ -> 0/#_(i,j) change,
> and Japanese had /N/ -> /u/ (or sometimes /i/), and later /au/ -> /o:/.
Kinda like how 'two' and 'twice', which was _nji3_ in T'ang Chinese, is now
_er4_ in Mandarin, _yi6_ in Cantonese, _ni_ or _ji_ in Sino-Japanese, and
_i_ in Sino-Korean.

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