Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

>>>>> "ekkilu" == ekkilu <ekkilu@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

ekkilu> That is a good observation. Viet pronunciation has more
ekkilu> "northerner" features than Cantonese. In particular, it
ekkilu> has some retroflex initials (tr-, s-, r-) absent in
ekkilu> Cantonese and other southern Chinese dialects.

Do the Chinese equivalents of Han-Viet words with retroflex initials
also have retroflex initials in Mandarin?



ekkilu> Funny thing is, the retroflex series tends to disappear in
ekkilu> today's norhtern Vietnamese speech, being better preserved
ekkilu> in the southern Viet dialects. Similary, southern Viet
ekkilu> tend to lose tone categories, while nothern Viet tend to
ekkilu> preserve tones. So you have a north-south flip as compared
ekkilu> to the Chinese case.

For Chinese, the north tends to keep initials but lose final
consonants and tones. (Beijing Mandarin has completely lost the
syllabic final consonants /-m/, /-p/, /-t/, /-k/, leaving only /-ng/
and /-n/. Some other Mandarin dialects have further merged /-n/ and
/-ng/, or replaced them with nasalisating of the preceeding vowel.)
The south tends to keep final consonants and tones (or even create
more tones, like Cantonese) but lose some initials features
(retroflex).

But the picture is not that simple. Shanghainese is "southern", but
it does lose final consonants. Final non-nasal consonants have merged
into /-?/, and nasal ones have been lost and replaced by nasalisation
of the preceeding vowel. In many cases, the nasalisation is lost
altogether. Shanghainese is also on the way of losing tones,
substituting it with a tone-stress system like Japanese. Yet,
Shanghainese has kept (from Middle Chinese) the voiced (unaspirated)
vs. voiceless aspirated vs. voiceless unaspirated distinction in the
initial stops. Mandarin and Cantonese have lost voiced stops for many
centuries.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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