A few questions

[ong]

I use side to prove that yongchuan and huian dialect are not the same with taiwanese.
In yongchun 千 is tshuinn but in another town 一都 is tshainn.In that town sit 坐 tser is 55 not 22 like other part of yongchun
I am not going get into details about strange vowel like eng not ing in huian.

[ong]

see this important article on yongchun,there are eight tones
http://www.365.com.my/download.php?file ... fe1e9d007d

[jilang]

In yongchun 千 is tshuinn

I'm quite sure 千 is "chheng".

sit 坐 tser is 55 not 22

Where can I find out how to read tones written in numbers like that?

PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 10:41 am Post subject:
see this important article on yongchun,there are eight tones
http://www.365.com.my/download.php?file ... fe1e9d007d

I've taken a look at it but it appears as a couple of blank pages.

Where can I see the huian and yongchun 县志?

How does the extra tone in YongChun sound lke and is it in HuiAn?

[ong]

you are joking,the file is okay.
On whose authority you say yongchun is ing .A local born in china or in malaysia?

[ong]

Please stop using eng.That is for ciangciu.Also we have Eng .

[ong]

It is the font problem,you need free big 5 and gb font from adobe

[xng]

Hi Jilang

Gooey, I didn't know this word, but just searched m-w.com and it's adjective form of "goo" 1) a viscid or sticky substance or 2) sentimental tripe. If yours is ko1, then 膏 sounds plausible.

be7/bue7 = can't, many think it's a contraction of bo5-e7 無會, in 廈門方言詞典 it's written as 勿會 (combined as one character)

Most of what you wrote is correct except for Be7, read

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5988

Koo is 糊 which means sticky or glue. 膏 means 'ointment' and has different tone.

[tadpole]

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 that POJ's 6th tone is the same as the 2nd. (I know it's not your fault, but it's just that this mistake has been propagated from one author to another.) If anything, the 6th tone is the same as the 7th tone. This is a well-known tonal evolution in Chinese linguistics, and it's known by the name 濁上變去 or 全濁上聲變去聲 ("muddy Shang tone turns into Qu tone").

Another thing is that in some Hokkien subdialects like Quanzhou (fully) and Teochew (partially), the 6th tone still exists and is pronounced differently from the 7th tone.

The 6th tone actually is very essential in the study of historical linguistics of Hokkien. Look at the frequently-used terms like below: (sorry for using my own Tadpolenese spelling)

m 毋 = negation prefix
url 有 = to have
sirl 是 = to be
dirl, zairl = 佇,在 = at, in, on
sniurl 想 = to think
cniurl 像 = as, like
darlnsirl 但是 = but

you will realize that these terms function like auxiliary verbs or prepositions in English (e.g: am/are/is, has/have, at/in/on, as, but, etc.) Now, pronounce these words in a given full English sentence, and you will realize that the words inside the parenthesis are all pronounced with low tones in English. The same happens in Hokkien.

What does this tell you? This tells you that once upon a time, ancient Hokkien (and/or ancient Chinese) was likely a tone-less language, just like English. (YangShang 6th tone category is correlated with auxiliary verbs and prepositions, whereas YinQu 4th tone cateogory is correlated with action verbs.)

If you don't separate the 6th tone from the 7th tone, it would be hard to realize about this fact. In fact, I only realized this fact, after I started to write out the 6th tone differently from the 7th tone.