Happy Chinese New Year!

[Mark Yong]

And I'd still like to know (I don't have a dictionary), for Mandarin "fu" words, how 斧,付,附,賦,副 etc are pronounced in Minnan. I thought 府,服 etc are closer to "ho" (though not the same).

Hi, Tan TG,

The response to your question is a bit tricky. The reason is because phonetically, they do not strictly belong to the same class of words. The evolution of Mandarin resulted in the loss of the end consonants, e.g, -b/-p, -g/-k, -d/-t, -m.

For instance, 服 belongs to the group of words that historically had the -k ending, which has been dropped in modern Mandarin but still retained in the Southern dialects. That is why it is 'fuk' in Cantonese and 'hock' in Minnan, but simply 'fu2' in Mandarin. 府, however, historically has no end consonant, so it maps to the 'u'/'oo' endings in Mandarin, Cantonese and Minnan.

This phenomenon is one of the reasons why I seldon rely on a Mandarin-based dictionary for tracing words. Even if I do, I end up relying on Mathews because for the vowel-ending words, he still divides them (somewhat loosely) between those which historically had some consonant endings, and those which did not.

And the huge number of homonyms in modern Mandarin is also another reason why, personally, I tend to steer away from using Mandarin when reading 'wenyan' texts!

Cheers,
Mark

[tantg]

Hi Mark,

Yes I do realise that Mandarin is not reliable for the purpose. But since you seemed to have based your earlier argument for 與 using the correspondence between "ho" (Minnan) and "yu" (Mandarin), I am wondering whether there can be a case for "ho" and the Mandarin "fu" series.

[Mark Yong]

Hi, Tan TG,

Oops, sorry I misunderstood your question! Okay, let's see if I can do some damage control.

I looked up a whole series of Mandarin 'fu' words. Unfortunately, none of those whose Minnan equivalent I am familiar with can be mapped to 'hO'. Most of them are mapped to Minnan 'hu' (e.g. kong-hu 廣府, tau-hu 豆腐).

Having said that, I do know of one Mandarin 'fu4' that is mapped to Minnan 'pO' (or 'po', depending on locality) - 傅. The 白讀 is 'pO' and the 文讀 is 'hu'. The 'pO' pronunciation normally appears when the word is used as a surname. The other example that cropped up recently was ca bO 諸婦 (if I recall correctly, Hong mentioned that it could be either 婦 or 母).

I think you are more likely to find Minnan 'hO' words mapped to the Mandarin 'he' or 'hu', e.g. 和, 虎, 狐.

The above is just from my limited empirical experience. Perhaps Hong can throw some light on this interesting topic?

Cheers,
Mark

[ong]

these words start with h in older period.There are 云母字=远，雨，园。熊。云母上古归匣母。匣母 means h .

[tantg]

So "f" do indeed maps to old "h". What remains is to find a case for the Mandarin vowel "u" in "fu" to map to old "o" in "ho".

We already know that "u" can map to "u" unchanged, as in 廣府,豆腐. Isn't "o" and "u" quite close?

[ong]

f is new sound of p,some experts like 李新魁 say minnan h was invented for f alphabet 1000 years ago.
That is why 發 baidu is puh,new wendu is huat.
反 old baidu ping,new sound huan.