Chinese languages

I don't really agree that it's a fact about She. You've given one example of vocabulary as opposed to the ten or so given by Yue-Hashimoto. Added to that, you have assumed that She referred to the same group eight hundred years ago as it does now in the PRC. She is a big group, mind you. The fact t...

I am not sure about this. The She 畲 relationship is certainly proven for Hakka and the Sinitic languages of the mountains, but I don't think it is the case for Hokkien. Ethnicity-wise there is nothing to prove here. It is a fact. 漳州 was full of She people, as documented in the famous Southern Song ...

1. 喙 means beak and not mouth. Not true in ancient times. http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/0198.gif 說文 has it listed simply as "mouth". 2. 喙 has the sound Hui in mandarin, Fui in cantonese. Usually a Hui in mandarin would translate to Hui in minnan too. But 喙 is a YinQu tone category wo...

Can someone enlighten me? I've just read Russell Jones' Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian (University of Malaya Press, 2009) which is for me an informative book about the various Hokkien subdialects of those who migrated to the Nanyang. But Jones states there is no Mandarin/Chinese charact...

POJ has tones 1-8 yet the 6th is exactly the same as the 2nd. I'm just wondering why they don't call the 7th as 6th and 8th as 7th. I haven't seen it in any book though. Because Middle Chinese had 8 tones, and all modern Chinese dialects evolved from this 8-tone system. It is a big mistake to say t...

Hi, http://www.pkucn.com/viewthread.php?tid=245215&extra=page%3D1 I think I may have finally found the right explanation for Hokkien's stereotony. I am so excited. In short, pre-sinicized Hokkien almost certainly was a tone-less language, and used topic markers much like Japanese or Korean. If y...

Oh, I forgot to add that Ah-bin perceives the following three points about Penang Hokkien: 1. Tone-1, a highish level tone, is lower than Tone-1 in other variants of Hokkien, perhaps 44 or 33 instead of 55. This is very standard in Teochew dialect, where Tone-1's running and standing tones coincide...

xng wrote:There's no such thing as a single 'SEA hokkien', each region or state has their own hokkien dialect.

I guess we all know that.

http://www.huachengnz.com/article/view_22544_1.html This article has a good description of the chaotic situation in Zhangzhou in Southern Song period. It also has a good discussion on the historical attitude of people towards the Chinese character 閩. As for Hmong, there are plenty of clips on Youtu...

If all the "y" vowel is "i" vowel in zhangzhou, then why is it that Penang hokkien use 'Lu' instead ? I am frankly not expert in Penang Hokkien. My experience in SEA Hokkien is only through Youtube clips, where I can notice some features that are closer to Quanzhou. 你/汝 's pronu...