Grasy,
If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
I am just amazed that the number of vietnamese tones is so similar to the southern chinese dialects such as min and yue which is part of "bai yue" in the past.
http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/tones/viet.htm
If vietnamese tones developed separately, they wouldnt be so similar , it could have been less or equal to 4.
Vietnamese is sino-tibetan Part 2
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qrasy
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Dylan Sung
The Chaozhou dialect has eight tones, or six if you merge the Ru tones with the others.Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 3:33 pm Post subject:
If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
I am just amazed that the number of vietnamese tones is so similar to the southern chinese dialects such as min and yue which is part of "bai yue" in the past.
The Baiyue are not one people, but a general term to indicate the many tribes living in southern China during the Zhou dynasty. Amongst them, the Jing are said to be the ethnic Vietnamese group related to some of these so called Baiyue. There are Jing words in Cantonese, but this may be due to borrowing, just as SinoViet vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese.
Dyl.
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Guest
Or it could be construed as more conservative, in that the language was not susceptible to as much change as other related languages. For example Icelandic spelling today is slightly different from the Old Norse written during the days of Snorri Stulusson and his Eddas, or the venacular Icelandic bible of Bishop Gudmundson three hundred years later in the sixteenth century. But it's related languages like Norwegian and Swedish have changed greatly to that of Icelandic, even though the Vikings which took Old Norse originally came from Norway.Cantonese is not an older form of Chinese, only "a language that preserves many aspects of the Older form of Chinese" or "a language more similar to it"
Cantonese in respect to tones and the preservation of -p -t -k endings is more conservative than Beijing dialect upon which modern standard mandarin's sounds are based.
Similarly, Min dialects and some Wu dialects preserve a richer consonantal onset array than Cantonese, so it is more conservative in that respect, since its voiced initials, apirated initials and unaspirated initials are all found in Middle Chinese.
But Mandarin is much more conservative in the preservation of dipthong vowels than Cantonese.
I think it was Wang Li the eminent sinologist who once coined a system of transliterating Chinese, by using the initials of Wu, the vowels rimes of Mandarin and the endings and tone of Cantonese. It was said to approximate MC transliterations quite well, apparently.
Dyl.
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AlexNg
We are going to side track a bit here.
Which chinese language - min, mandarin, cantonese, wu, xiang, hakka
resembles the chinese spoken in ancient china (shang, chou dynasty)
and which resembles middle chinese (chin, han, tang dynasty) ?
I heard that min branch off from ancient chinese and the others branch off from middle chinese ? What does it mean ?
Which language has the richest sounds. Personally, I think that mandarin is a very weak language due to its lack of p, t, k endings. Of course, it has the r sound at the beginning which other chinese language doesn't have.
What about vietnamese sounds ?
Which chinese language - min, mandarin, cantonese, wu, xiang, hakka
resembles the chinese spoken in ancient china (shang, chou dynasty)
and which resembles middle chinese (chin, han, tang dynasty) ?
I heard that min branch off from ancient chinese and the others branch off from middle chinese ? What does it mean ?
Which language has the richest sounds. Personally, I think that mandarin is a very weak language due to its lack of p, t, k endings. Of course, it has the r sound at the beginning which other chinese language doesn't have.
What about vietnamese sounds ?
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Dylan Sung
The sounds of those distant dynasties are no longer extant in one language in Chinese, or any other sino-xenic language which adopted Chinese. One can only say that from the most consitent early systemisation of sounds, such as Qieyun in AD 601, that elements of sintial sounds, medials, vowels, endings and tones survive in modern sounds of modern dialects. As there are no recordings of speech in Chinese from the late Qing to the earliest dynasties, all he have to go on is the written texts in poetical works to guess, -that right, "guess" - the sounds which may have existed then.AlexNg wrote:We are going to side track a bit here.
Which chinese language - min, mandarin, cantonese, wu, xiang, hakka
resembles the chinese spoken in ancient china (shang, chou dynasty)
and which resembles middle chinese (chin, han, tang dynasty) ?
This is a difficult question as it isn't an area that I've read up on much. However, many Min dialects does not seem to obey certain sound changes by comparing them to Qieyun and Guangyun rime books. All the other dialects seem to be able to, except Min. Min dialectologists have found the existence of syllabic prefixes surviving in modern Min dialects, and this has been theorised as being an element of Old Chinese as a grammatical indicator of word usage. See Laurant Sagart - Roots of Old Chinese. These are said to date to Western Zhou or earlier.AlexNg wrote: I heard that min branch off from ancient chinese and the others branch off from middle chinese ? What does it mean ?
Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.AlexNg wrote: Which language has the richest sounds. Personally, I think that mandarin is a very weak language due to its lack of p, t, k endings. Of course, it has the r sound at the beginning which other chinese language doesn't have.What about vietnamese sounds ?AlexNg wrote:
There are many Mandarin dialects, some of which retain the Ru tone. The Beijing dialect being prestigious on account of it being the capital is unfortunate to have lost its endings as early as the Yuan Dynasty. Other than Min, the Wu dialects retain features of voiced initials, rich variety of vowels, rich variety in endings, and retain all the four main tones.
Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.
Dyl.
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qrasy
>If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.
>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.
<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.
Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese
>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.
>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.
From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.
[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.
>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.
<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.
Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese
>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.
>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.
From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.
[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]
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qrasy
>If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.
>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.
<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.
Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese
>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.
>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.
From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.
[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.
>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.
<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.
Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese
>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.
>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.
From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.
[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]