Re: and [h] in East Asia

On 10 Mar 2007 12:52:03 -0800, "Andrew" <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mar 10, 4:35 pm, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Another thing to add: Taiwanese has no [f] phoneme, replacing it with
/p/. (But many syllables with initial [f] in Mandarin start with [hu]
in Taiwanese, due to historical development.) This is also the case
with Malay-Indonesian. So, French "savon" becomes "sapon" in Malay.

Soap in Malay and Taiwanese is sabun/sapbun.

The f/p merging is less common in Malay than it was: early Rumi
spelling had telephone as talipon, but now apart from faham/paham I
don't think many people would mix the two up, and there are plenty of
English and Arabic loanwords that have the letter f. I wonder if this
is because Jawi didn't adopt the letter pa until late, or if it was
the other way around, that the Persian letter pe was not adopted
because f/p was not phonemic. Replacing f with p is still common among
Filipinos though.

I have never heard Hokkien/Taiwanese speakers mispronounce the letter
f, despite the fact that it doesn't occur in Taiwanese. I suppose this
is because they are used to it in Mandarin/Cantonese/Hakka.




I've heard some Taiwanese Mandarin speakers' "hua" for "fa". It's
probably not relevant to the original poster's question, though, since
the f/h alternation that he described for Japanese English makes
perfect sense without reference to Taiwan.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: and [h] in East Asia
    ... Soap in Malay and Taiwanese is sabun/sapbun. ... The f/p merging is less common in Malay than it was: ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: and [h] in East Asia
    ... Soap in Malay and Taiwanese is sabun/sapbun. ... The f/p merging is less common in Malay than it was: ...
    (sci.lang)