Re: About Hebrew Emphatics

Wow! That would make early Chinese the first language
I've heard of to have breathy-voiced phonemes without
modal ones.

--- Danny Wier <dawiertx@...> wrote:
> 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.


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/