Re: John Cowan mangles Pinyin again

From: "John Cowan"

> "Daniel A. Wier" wrote:
>
> > I compared a bunch of Chinese words with
> > their Korean and Japanese equivalent, and found that many of these
borrowed
> > into the latter two (and pronounced in Cantonese and other "Chinese"
> > languages) -- many end in <k>.
>
> Generally speaking the checked syllables of the ru tone in Middle
> Chinese got distributed semi-randomly among the other three tones
> when final stops were lost.  If there truly are more of them
> in the 4th tone (= Middle 3rd tone) category, I'd be interested
> in the evidence.
>
> (Note: Middle 1st tone split into Mandarin 1st and 2nd, Middle 2nd
> became Mandarin 3rd, Middle 3rd became Mandarin 4th.  Some people
> number the four Middle tones 1, 3, 5, 7 for this reason).
I'm unclear as to your usage of the term "checked", but let's break it down
further in the Chinese way:

yin ping voiced           yang ping voiced
yin ping voiceless       yang ping voiceless
yin shang voiced        yang shang voiced
yin shang voiceless    yang shang voiceless
yin qu voiced            yang qu voiced
yin qu voiceless         yang qu voiceless
yin ru voiced             yang ru voiced
yin ru voiceless          yang ru voiceless

As far as Mandarin is concerned:

yin ping voiced --> does not apply
yin ping voiceless --> first tone
yang ping voiced --> second tone
yang ping voiceless --> does not apply
yin shang voiced --> does not apply
yin shang voiceless --> third tone
yang shang voiced --> fourth tone
yang shang voiceless --> third tone
yin qu voiced --> does not apply
yin qu voiceless --> fourth tone
yang qu voiced --> fourth tone
yang qu voiceless --> does not apply
yin ru voiced --> does not apply
yin ru voiceless --> first, second, third, fourth tones
yang ru voiced --> second, fourth tones
yang ru voiceless --> does not apply

Yin ru and yang ru are where the syllables ending in stops (formerly, and in
dialects like Cantonese and Taiwanese) are/were located, so statistically
speaking, I think Danny is correct to infer that there is a higher
concentration of such syllables in the fourth tone. Second tone also gets
its fair share, but although I haven't done a formal study, my personal
feeling is that more congregate around fourth tone. In a comparison of
Mandarin and Cantonese, the first "clipped" tone of Cantonese usually
parlays into a Mandarin first tone, while the "clipped" third and sixth
tones of Cantonese break down into the second and fourth tones of Mandarin.
Again, I'm working intuitively here, but I find the number of syllables
which originally ended in a stop and which have made it to the Mandarin
third tone to be rather limited.

Kou