Re: 'Tefu-tefu' read as 'Choo-choo'

Zhen Lin wrote: 
Bart Mathias wrote:

My guess is they weren't diphthongs originally--they might have even
been "felt" by Japanese speakers as "owu" and "eyi"--then went through a
brief stage as diphthongs, which Japanese, and Korean, abhor.  Sam
Martin (and everyone else?) apparently disagrees with me on this; he
holds that words like こい in NJ *are* diphthongs.



N.J.? Nara Japanese? こい as in 来い? I thought 来い was a more modern
development... I'm confused...

Sorry. Not Nara. I'm one of those who refer to modern Japanese as "New Japanese" (at least when abbreviating), to save "MJ" for "Middle/medieval J." I was thinking of 鯉 specifically; I was once shocked to hear my brother-in-law, who is fluent in Japanese, refer to those fish in English as "coy."

There is at least one case of "oi" in OJ, 老い, but that was morphologically--and I dare presume psychologically,{oy-i}.

Anyway. Interestingly, in modern Mandarin - there is no [o:] or [e:] but
there are [7U] ([7] = close-mid back unrounded vowel, similar to [@])
and [eI] (analysed as [@] nucleus + [u] coda for [7U] and [@] + [i] for
[eI]). Modern Cantonese also has no [o:] or [e:] (but it has [O:], [O] =
open-mid back rounded vowel) - it has instead [ou] and [ei].

One of the phonemic systems I made up for fun during my first semester of Mandarin (we used Chao's _Mandarin Primer_) was a two-vowel one. (I'm pretty sure I've heard of other people doing that.) I did another with more vowels--five or six, I don't remember.

Aah. I wish I had a computerised comparative phonology database of 漢
字... (I also wish information on Chinese and Korean diachronics were
easier to find on the Internet.)

Well, they didn't *all* become ウ or イ.  Some of the early ones have
"g."  相 as サガ and サグ, 興 as コゴ, 望 as マガ/マグ, for example.
(These occur mostly in place names, such as 相楽山 [さがらかやま], 相模,
etc., in my limited experience.)



Hmm hmm hmm, very interesting. (Especially サガ and コゴ - I would have
imagined サグ and コグ.)

My guess (don't I always have a wild guess?) is that after the "echo
vowel" method of making Chinese finals pronounceable was given up



Are there more examples of this? And how does テラ (assuming the from
Korean 절 hypothesis) fit into this scheme? [Come to think of it, I'm
wondering why ラリルレロ is used in katakana orthography of Ainu for the
-r final instead of only ル. And why yukar was imported as ユーカラ
instead of as ユーカル or ユカル.]

テラ might fit in either of two ways, because we don't know for sure whether that neutralized "e" would have been ko or otsu. The best case for echo vowel (and a better Korean-look-alike) would have it */tiara/, but probably */taira/ could be considered echo-vowelish.

in
favor of attaching "i" or "u," the least sonorant vowels, that 相 became
*/sagu/, 性 became */segi/, and then the sort of thing that would happen
so often to "ku" and "ki" (yoki --> yoi, hayaku --> hayau, etc.) got an
early start with all of these "gi"s and "gu"s.


My personal hypothesis is that they came over as nasalised /i/ and /u/,
and that the nasalisation was later lost. (Do the dialects with 読うだ
and 飛うだ have a nasalised /u/? What of 並うだ?)

I can't answer the question about the dialects, but there is no (other) evidence that I know of for う or い having been nasalized when not in the influence of a nasal consonant.

I presume the teachers (and students) of Chinese managed final [N] OK. Whether that was naturalized as nasal vowels or nasal glides, or as /gu/ or /gi/, may remain forever a moot question.

[...] 
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