Re: [p]>[m]?

--- Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

> As a side note, Korean borrowed Chinese [v] or [w]
as
> [m], e.g. 'Taiwan' is /t&man/ in Korean (maybe this
is
> a bit antiquated, however, and nowadays it is really
> /taiwan/).
I believe this is because Middle Chinese had a
nasalized bilabial fricative or something like that
(perhaps [B_n]?).

A good illustration of the descendants of this phoneme
are the various Japanese words for 'horse' borrowed
from Chinese --- 'ba', 'ma', etc. [B_n] became [P] in
some dialects, and [m] in others, and Japanese shows
this.

(the Modern Mandarin for this is [ma])

No idea about Korean, tho'.


	

	
		
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