Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

Lee Sau Dan wrote:

> ekkilu> The problem is that people tried to ascribe Greek origin
> ekkilu> to this word, and many Chinese people even believed that
> ekkilu> typhoon was imported from English into Chinese. That's the
> ekkilu> silly part. Your -ng -> -n is answered as well in the
> ekkilu> following:
>
> ekkilu> "The modern form of typhoon was influenced by a borrowing
> ekkilu> from the Cantonese variety of Chinese, namely the word
> ekkilu> taaîfung, and respelled to make it look more like
> ekkilu> Greek.
>
> Really? Why do they spell the Cantonese syllable [t'Oi] as "tai" or
> "ty", rather than "toy"?

Are you not aware of dialects of English in which /tay/ is pronounced
[tOj]?

> FYI, "typhoon" is [t'Oi22 fUN55] in Cantonese. So, if you think
> "typhoon" came from Cantonese, you not only have to explain the
> discrepancy in the final "n", but also the wrongly spelt diphthong in
> the first syllable.

Can you point to _any_ English word that ends with, or even contains,
the sequence "oong" /uwN/?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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