Talk:Chinese sound correspondences

Unfortunately I do not have the data for Middle Korean. Linguoboy might. - 振霖_T 05:57, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

I made my own proposal for Middle chinese phonology: v1 (probably closer to early middle chinese): [1], v2 (probably closer to late middle chinese): [2]

Suzhou Wu sound changes

> Wu — Suzhou The following recent sound changes apply but are omitted to reduce clutter:

> [k kʰ g h ɦ n] > [tɕ tɕʰ dʑ ɕ dʑ ȵ] / _[i,j,y,ɥ]

can anyone provide examples for the ɦ > dʑ change?

As far as I can tell, according to Wugniu.com and wu-chinese.com/minidict, in Suzhou Wu /ɦ/ followed by any glide just treats that glide as an onset.

e.g. 系 /ɦiʲ²¹³/ -> [ji̝²¹³] <yi6> (c.f. Mandarin <xi4>)

现 /ɦiɪ²¹³/ -> [ji²¹³] <ye6> (c.f. Mandarin <xian4>

云 /ɦyn²²³/ -> [jyn ~ ɥin] <yun2>

even more complex, something like 懸 *ɦyan /ɦi̯ø²²³/ -> [jø̱²²³] (c.f. Mandarin <xuan2> t same with the labial /u~w/ medial glide. 皇 /ɦu̯ɑ̃²²³/ <waon2>, 华 /ɦu̯ɑ²²³/ <wa2>, 还 /ɦu̯ᴇ/ <we2>

- User:Myriaddestiny 07 July 2023

The ɦ > dʑ is likely a typo. Nevertheless, I changed the article so that Shanghainese is the main representative for Wu due to the availability of data that I have. Hopefully the updated notes on its sound changes are more accurate this time. --Excusememoi (talk) 20:53, 4 August 2024 (PDT)

Updates on the article so far + message to anyone who's new here

I'm sure you—the reader—are looking up some juicy information about CJKV sound correspondences that this article has to offer. Not too long ago, the charts stood very incomplete, with the Mandarin and Cantonese columns being the only ones comprehensively filled in while some others (Min, Hakka, Wu, Japanese, Korean) were only partially filled in at best. I tried my best to fill in the rest of the charts and spruce up the article over the past few months. Here is a summary of the major changes I have made so far:

• I adopted the following romanizations—Pinfa for Hakka, Wugniu for Wu, RR for Korean.
• Data for Moiyan Hakka, Shanghainese, Japanese (both Go-on and Kan-on), and Modern Korean are now near-complete, mainly thanks to zi.tools
• I made a whole new column for Vietnamese (dialect-neutral) and filled it to near-completion.
• I unified the formatting for the charts' content.
• Some edits to the Mandarin and Cantonese columns so that they're not as cluttered.

Why did I do all this? Despite the content not being as comprehensive back when I first made my contributions here, I saw potential in this article being the number one go-to for curious (sino-)linguistics folks to learn how the sounds in the Middle Chinese phonetic system correspond in various modern languages, and to make comparisons among those languages based on their phonetic outcomes. After all, a publicly accessible website that provides correspondence tables of Middle Chinese initials and finals for 7 modern languages is pretty hard to come by. A big thanks goes to the users that had contributed to the article before me; if it weren't for them, I would not have the motivation to contribute to this endeavour.

That being said, there's still quite a few things here that needs to be done or decided on:

• Min doesn't descend from Middle Chinese, so the colloquial pronunciations are likely incompatible with the charts. Either the entire Min column should be removed or be filled with corresponding literary pronunciations (which do come from Middle Chinese). I experimented with that for the onsets, but I currently lack the confidence to continue onto the rimes. If Min does end up being included, I think it should be moved so that it's between Wu and Japanese so that all the direct descendants of Middle Chinese are grouped together.
• The Old Mandarin column only appears in the rime charts, and it's filled with romanizations that are unclear in indicating what sounds they refer to. Either someone has to fully flesh out the info for Old Mandarin or have the whole column removed, which would save some needed horizontal space for the charts.
• There is an excessive amount of exceptional/example characters provided for Mandarin and Cantonese, so it may be better to cut down on those exceptions/examples so that only the most common or notable ones are included.
• The resources section is full of dead links, which should be dealt with, but I don't know if simply removing all of them is the best course of action.

For those of you who would like to start contributing to the article and discussion here, you probably found that that you need to register in order to be allowed to do so. Good thing is, the approval process is fairly simple and shouldn't take more than a couple days to get a response, so please consider joining! --Excusememoi (talk) 21:41, 9 August 2024 (PDT)

Some explanations on the column for Phags-Pa (Old Mandarin)

The column for Phags-Pa (Old Mandarin) is an attempt at transcribing the values from the Menggu Ziyun ( [3] ). It is mostly pulled from the following source: [4] . Because it follows the Menggu Ziyun, the "æk/ɛk/jæk" division 2/3 rhymes have "ay" reflexes due to the regional dialect used in that book, where modern Mandarin has Literary readings in "e" [ɤ] and colloquial readings in "ai" [ai].

The transcription corresponds to the following Phags-Pa letters:

• w: ꡓ (syllable initial and final), ꡧ (medial)
• y: ꡗ (syllable initial and final), ꡨ (medial, only used in ya/yay/yam/yan/yang, normally ꡦ "ee" is used instead)
• h: ꡜ (transcribed as ʰ in the source)
• i: ꡞ
• u: ꡟ
• e: ꡠ
• o: ꡡ
• ee: ꡦ. This letter pulls triple duty: by itself as [e/ʲe/je] (often overlapping in use with ꡠ "e"), in front of other vowels to indicate iotation [j] or palatalization [ʲ], and as a kind of umlaut to indicate the fronting of "u" and "o" (and potentially "w") - for instance Uyghur /y/ and /ø/ are spelled as "eeu" ꡦꡟ and "eeo" ꡦꡡ. (Transcribed as "ÿ" or "ÿa" in the source)
• a: This vowel is automatically implied when none of i/u/e/o/ee are present.
• m: ꡏ
• n: ꡋ
• ng: ꡃ

Phags-Pa does make use of some special combinations:

• hi (ꡜꡞ): Used in the hi/hiw/him/hin/hing/hiy rhymes, corresponds to the modern Mandarin rhymes "si/zi/ci/shi/zhi/chi/ri" [ɿ/ʅ], "ou" [ou], "en" [ən], "eng" [ɤŋ], and "e" [ɤ] (literary) / "ei" [ei] (colloquial). Most reconstructions of this vowel are [ə], or occasionally [ɨ].
• hang (ꡜꡃ): Only used in the hang rhyme. Becomes "uang" [uɑŋ] in modern Mandarin. Presumably some kind of unrounded velar glide or diphthong along the lines of [ɰaŋ].
• ue (ꡟꡠ): Generally becomes "uei" [uei] in Mandarin. Probably no longer labiopalatalized by the time of the Menggu Ziyun.
• eeue (ꡦꡟꡠ): Generally merges into "uei" [uei] in Mandarin. Might have been labiopalatalized at some point. Normally these rhymes originally had "Chongniu".
• wee (ꡧꡦ): Generally becomes "üe" [yɛ] in Mandarin. Labiopalatalized. It's not clear to me if this was different or the same as "we" (ꡧꡠ).
• eeu, eeo (ꡦꡟ, ꡦꡡ): Rounded vowels with palatalization, presumably front rounded.
• eei (ꡦꡞ): Presumably [ji] or [ʲi]. It's not clear how different they were from "i" (ꡞ). Seems to apply more often to "Chongniu" rhymes.
• ywi: Used for 疫, 役, becomes "yi" in Mandarin, presumably labiopalatalized at one point.

Because of the way the letter "ee" ꡦ combines multiple functions, I'm not sure what a better transcription would look like - for instance, should "eeon" be transcribed as if it were [jøn], [ʲøn], [øn], [jon], or [ʲon]?