Re: why is Japanese (spoken) nothing like Chinese?

>>>>> "Geoff" == Geoff <grw888@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Geoff> I'm more interested in when the Chinese -ng endings became
Geoff> reduced to long vowels in Japanese. Middle Chinese
Geoff> 鈭祇? kjang-to ---> Kyouto. As with
Geoff> ?曹漪 Toukyou (dung-kjang), etc.

Yeah. I have also observed this, and I'm interested in knowing why
and how. When I try to guess the on-reading of Kanji's -- based on my
Cantonese knowledge, I already apply this rule implicitly.

And recently, I've discovered that not long ago, Japanese apparently
had the [u] glide in words like "gwatsu" (month). (That is written
with the Kanas 'ga', small 'wa' and 'tsu'.) The books I read said
that during the last century, they did a spelling reform in Japanese
to align the kanas with modern Japanese pronunciations. In the
reform, "gwa" are replaced by "ge".

Now, I understand why "month" is sometimes "gatsu" and sometimes
"getsu", which has been a mystery to me. Now, the older pronunciation
"gwatsu" does look more similar to the Middle Chinese pronunciation --
something like /Nuat+r/. (+r means yang2-ru4 tone.)


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

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

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