Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

benlizross wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >
> > benlizross wrote:
> > >
> > > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Lee Sau Dan wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > >>>>> "benlizross" == benlizross <benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > > > >
> > > > > >> > 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
> > > > >
> > > > > benlizross> Is every little phonotactic gap like this assumed to
> > > > > benlizross> be the result of a Rule of English Phonology? I
> > > > > benlizross> believe the Aussies have /uN/ in "boong". (And maybe
> > > > > benlizross> some sinophiles pronounce names like "Fung" and "Sung"
> > > > > benlizross> that way.) Even if we imagine that /uwN/ is somehow
> > > > > benlizross> impossible, would not /uN/ be a possible English form
> > > > > benlizross> for the Cantonese word? FWIW OED has an 1806 citation
> > > > > benlizross> in which the word is spelled <ty-foong>.
> > > >
> > > > I'm trying to explain to LSD that absence of /N/ in the English word
> > > > does not require absence of /N/ in the source language. The /uN/
> > > > sequence in the source language (for instance, Cantonese) should yield
> > > > /uwn/ in English.
> > >
> > > What I'm questioning is whether you have a theory which predicts
> > > _exactly_ this outcome. And I don't see it so far.
> >
> > There can't be a "theory" unless there's a pattern. What are some other
> > [-uwN] words that have been borrowed by English? /uwN/ doesn't exist in
> > English, so it has to come in differently.
>
> That's the theory that I'm questioning -- the "so" that links those two.
> Is there no such thing as an accidental gap in your theory?

Is there no such thing as an explicable, or principled, gap in _your_
theory?

> ("Boong" was mentioned here a
> > few days ago -- as an insulting term for Australian native?, which makes
> > it an oddity, an "expressive," if you will, outside normal phonology as
> > "Bach" is.)
>
> What nonsense. I suppose this goes with your bizarre dogma that "names
> aren't words"?

Another of I. J. Gelb's interests was prosopography, so maybe that's
where I picked it up. (He was president of the American Names Society
for quite a while.) If you don't accept the mainstream theory of the
nature of names (or "definite descriptions," to use an archaism), do you
have a better account of them?

> "Bach" is a foreign name (I don't mean [+foreign] or some
> such putative feature, I mean the name of a person from a non-English
> speaking culture.) Such names may be de-naturalized to taste, including
> the use of non-English phonemes like /x/, but most people use a /k/. (In
> fact in my native dialect, where we didn't have anything much like [a],
> we pronounced his name to rhyme with "rock".)

"Rock" is /rak/. (That's why [a] is called "short o" in traditional
grammar.)

> "Boong" may be offensive, but it is no more "outside normal phonology"
> than "dago" or "***".

Except it now turns out that it isn't an example of /uwN/ at all.

> > If, of course, Australian English has a plethora of words borrowed from
> > Australian languages that end in -oong, then a new (Firthian) subsystem
> > has arisen,
>
> Why on earth would you want to postulate a new "subsystem", Firthian or
> otherwise? They've simply acquired a new word which includes a phoneme
> sequence that wasn't previously instantiated.

In nearly 2000 years of the English language, a certain sequence was
never "instantiated," and you think that's a coincidence?

> and if "typhoon" had been borrowed in Australia from
> > Cantonese in the last century or so, it probably would have been
> > "typhoong."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.