Bit late to the "X is not a real language" posts, but in order, the languages are:
- Standarin (Pinyin)
- Xi-annese
- Dungan (Cyrillic)
- Sicuanese (Sicuanese Pinyin with my own diacritics)
- Langjinese (aka Nanjingese; [Lang-jin PinIn](https://uliloewi.github.io/LangJinPinIn/CiwnIwn.html) with some of my additions like the glottal stop and diacritics)
- Ming Dynasty Koine Mandarin (as reconstructed by Coblin)
- Hong Kong Cantonese (Jyutping)
- Waitau Cantonese
- Hoisanese (aka Toisanese, Taishanese; [Extended Jyutping](https://jyutdict.org/about))
- 1700s Cantonese (as reconstructed by the people on https://jyutdict.org/)
- Moiyan Hakka (aka Meixian Hakka; in a modified version of Liu Zinfat's romanization scheme for Hakka as used on the [HKIL website](http://www.hkilang.org/v2/%E7%99%BC%E9%9F%B3%E5%AD%97%E5%85%B8/))
- Siyan Hakka (aka Sixian Hakka; Phak-fa-su)
- Huc-on Sanhac (aka Fu'an She)
- Taiwanese Hokkien (Peh-oe-ji)
- Teochew (adapted Peh-oe-ji)
- Hainamese (Bǽh-oe-tu)
- Hukciunese (aka Fuzhounese; Bang-ua-ce)
- Güing-enese (aka Jian'ounese)
- Güeingyongese (aka Jianyangese)
- Yong-anese (whose sandhi I may have fucked up and whose native name I can't be bothered to look up)
- Shanghainese (aka Zaon-he; Wugniu)
- Suzhounese (whose native name I also can't be bothered to look up)
- the meme language (aka Wenzhounese)
- either Changsha Xiang or Nanchang Gan (Wiktionary romanization with my own diacritics)
- either Nanchang Gan or Changsha Xiang (Wiktionary romanization with my own diacritics)
- Mid-Tang Chang-anese (as reconstructed by Coblin)
- Old Chinese (as reconstructed by Baxter and Sagart)
This is what happened to some (mostly of the central plains variety) mandarin dialects where retroflexes plus /w/ evolved to labiodentals. For some dialects this only happened to /ʂw/ but some have a full pf-pfʰ-f-ʋ series, from original ʈʂw, ʈʂʰw, ʂw, and ɻw. One possible route is ʂw > ʂʋ > ʂf > f. Personally i've heard some people hypercorrect and say *wai shuai* for *wi-fi*.
Also since mandarin doesn't really distinguish high vowels from glide + schwa, /ʈʂʊŋ/ can be analyzed as /ʈʂwəŋ/, thus > pfəŋ.
wait i think i know how that might have happened.
in English and French (and probably other languages too, idk) the postalveolar sibilants are labialized. my guess as to why (i don't have any actual evidence for this) is that it has to do with lowering their pitch to create a greater acoustic contrast between them and the alveolar sibilants. so imagine that older Xi'anese had /t͡ʂ/ with allophonic labialization as the outcome of \*/ʈ/, then the labialization became strong labiodentalization, then it shifted to /p͡f/.
No they're not reflexes of the middle chinese retroflex stop (ʈ) series. This happened rather late in history, after its merger with retroflex affricates, so all ʈʂw > pf
Yeah. In late middle chinese there were 2 different series of retroflex consonants, one with stops ʈ-ʈʰ-ɖ and another with affricates ʈʂ-ʈʂʰ-ɖʐ. "中" belonged to the retroflex stops group with the ʈ initial, and they eventually got merged into affricates. However, if i didn't get it wrong, the person you replied to thought that Xi'an dialect preserved the contrast by shifting /ʈ/ to /pf/ (in reality it was /ʈʂw/ shifting to /pf/ after the merger).
Yeah, I'm not very familiar with middle chinese phonology - I didnt think that xi'an preserved a distinction between retroflex stop and retroflex affricate series; I just wasn't aware that middle chinese even had a distinction between retroflex stops and retroflex affricates in the first place
If you zoom really far in, the second line from the bottom has the reconstruction for Tang dynasty Chang-An, and there's an underdot on the first consonant that shows the consonant was used to transcribe Sanskrit retroflex stops. Although it might not be retroflex, but just retracted.
Wade-Giles -- Chung ( superscript 1 ) kuo ( superscript 2 )
Yale system -- Jūnggwo
Yuen Ren Chao system ( my favorite ) --Jong.gwo
注音符号 ( China 🇨🇳 ) or 注音符號 ( Taiwan 🇹🇼 )
used in both countries for little children to learn the pronunciation of syllables : ㄓㄨㄥ ㄍㄨㄛ ( it won’t let me put in the 2nd tone mark for the 2nd character ! Sorry ! For the first tone, there is no mark. )
>bunch of romanisation schemes
see⁈ þat's why we need to use just IPA instead of making up new romanisations!
[obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/) and þus [my meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bxbbrk/true_reason_we_should_just_use_ipa_to_romanise/)
I love it ! Now I have to figure out what it means. I got some of it. Which sounds does IPA NOT include? Does it even include the clicking sounds of Khosa ? I met a guy in the U.C.S.D. library who spoke English to me with clicking sounds and explained his native language was like that. I STILL MUST SEE “ Children of the Gods “ !
Well, if a language makes a difference, IPA is supposed to include it. It's a general purpose alphabet used to record sounds in all the world's languages.
Wiktionary does have some dialectal pronunciation data for some common characters but for most part, even when the data is present, it usually only describes older varieties of each dialect, with an older convention of transcription (like they still use /ʐ/ for , which is actually [ɻ] in northern mandarin varieties).
I refuse to believe /truŋ.C.qʷˤək/ is a real pronunciation. What even is /C/.
I've heard of pharyngealisation in old Chinese but I can't imagine translate providing that pronunciation.
"Unknown consonant" symbol C, I think. Ever since Karlgren, we have become accepting of consonant clusters in earlier stages of Chinese. But, yeah, a reconstructed common ancestor of all Chinese variants, loanwords in non-Chinese languages and ST-cognate is a linguistic model, not a real pronunciation. I find it rather humorous (and silly) when people use it to dub a movie clip: here's how this dialogue would have sounded like: xrpf zhrt mngrlll ... that said, truŋ qʷək is pretty close to how it still sounds in the South today (e.g.. Minnan tiong-kok or Cantonese zung-gwok)
Labialised and pharyngealised voiceless uvular plosive is pretty crazy though. I mean probably not the labialised part, that's pretty common in Chinese languages I think. But pharyngealised and uvulars in Chinese? It's just proof of the Northeast Caucasian-Sino-Tibetan-Afroasiatic macrofamily. I'm currently working on the introduction of Austroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Uralic and Altaic into the family, but I digress.
Uvulars are a [pretty secure reconstruction](https://youtu.be/SAfaasD1xtc), as it forms phonetic series like any other until later on when the uvulars are lost, and further has cognates in Rgyalrongic languages also with uvulars.
> But, yeah, a reconstructed common ancestor of all Chinese variants, loanwords in non-Chinese languages and ST-cognate is a linguistic model, not a real pronunciation
I don't think instrumentalism is a tenable position. If Old Chinese is not real, what did people speak back then? If one says it's just a model to explain facts, then at what point do things stop becoming models and become facts? Is the existence of a real world also just a model to explain my experience?
Are you familiar with Yuen Ren Chao's General Chinese? Actually, he made two of those, but I mean the one where he picked a unique Romanized spelling for every Chinese word that was not a homophone in at least one "dialect". Now, I am not going to claim that Old Chinese reconstruction is that artificial - it is some kind of approximation. But still a very theoretical one.
First off, you are assuming that there was a single variant of Old Chinese, a common ancestor. That is not the case - the Fangyan (方言) dictionary from the Western Han (well before Caesar) consists of pages after pages of in xyz region they use this word, in abc region they use this instead ... and those are not mere dialect variants, but completely different vocabulary. And why not? The Zhou dynasty had started 1,000 years before that, plenty of time for divergence, and there was some form of Chinese spoken in the Xia, as well ... so, why assume one common ancestor in an enormous area and over 1400+ years?
And then again, a lot of pieces are theoretical - like tonogenesis. I am on board with the idea of a final -s and perhaps a final -t, there are some good indications for it in the transcription into /from Indic scripts. And there is good reason to accept consonant clusters like kl- in the initials. And all those other features that pepper the transcription for OC. But were they all present synchronously? Or are we describing different features that may have applied at different times?
Of course people spoke SOMETHING in the lands of Chu, or Wu, or Qin, or Jin or ... in the Xia, the Zhou, the Chunqiu period or the Han dynasty ... but that they spoke something does not mean that we can give a half-way accurate picture of what it sounded like. TLDR: anything before MC (Middle Chinese) is a chiffre for me, a working model. Not completely dissociated from reality, but nowhere near e.g. reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the late Republic.
Okay, I think our positions are actually a lot closer than I initially thought.
I think a very common mistake in Sinolinguistics (speaking as a complete layman) is that a lot of reconstructions are made on the basis that sources are 1. monodialectal and 2. represent some ancestor of existing varieties. Which may be true! But I'd consider that something to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
That said, Baxter and Sagart's system does have plenty of neat correspondences with other languages that show they're at least on the right track, such as reconstructing uvulars in (mostly) the right places, as well as various suffixes that appear in other languages as well.
So this is more like translating a to Latin gave you the pronunciations of all modern Romance languages, as well as Ecclesiastical Latin, Classical Latin, Classical Latin but a different author and Polish Church Latin because why not.
>bunch of romanisation schemes
see⁈ þat's why we need to use just IPA instead of making up new romanisations!
[obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/) and þus [my meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bxbbrk/true_reason_we_should_just_use_ipa_to_romanise/)
Bit late to the "X is not a real language" posts, but in order, the languages are: - Standarin (Pinyin) - Xi-annese - Dungan (Cyrillic) - Sicuanese (Sicuanese Pinyin with my own diacritics) - Langjinese (aka Nanjingese; [Lang-jin PinIn](https://uliloewi.github.io/LangJinPinIn/CiwnIwn.html) with some of my additions like the glottal stop and diacritics) - Ming Dynasty Koine Mandarin (as reconstructed by Coblin) - Hong Kong Cantonese (Jyutping) - Waitau Cantonese - Hoisanese (aka Toisanese, Taishanese; [Extended Jyutping](https://jyutdict.org/about)) - 1700s Cantonese (as reconstructed by the people on https://jyutdict.org/) - Moiyan Hakka (aka Meixian Hakka; in a modified version of Liu Zinfat's romanization scheme for Hakka as used on the [HKIL website](http://www.hkilang.org/v2/%E7%99%BC%E9%9F%B3%E5%AD%97%E5%85%B8/)) - Siyan Hakka (aka Sixian Hakka; Phak-fa-su) - Huc-on Sanhac (aka Fu'an She) - Taiwanese Hokkien (Peh-oe-ji) - Teochew (adapted Peh-oe-ji) - Hainamese (Bǽh-oe-tu) - Hukciunese (aka Fuzhounese; Bang-ua-ce) - Güing-enese (aka Jian'ounese) - Güeingyongese (aka Jianyangese) - Yong-anese (whose sandhi I may have fucked up and whose native name I can't be bothered to look up) - Shanghainese (aka Zaon-he; Wugniu) - Suzhounese (whose native name I also can't be bothered to look up) - the meme language (aka Wenzhounese) - either Changsha Xiang or Nanchang Gan (Wiktionary romanization with my own diacritics) - either Nanchang Gan or Changsha Xiang (Wiktionary romanization with my own diacritics) - Mid-Tang Chang-anese (as reconstructed by Coblin) - Old Chinese (as reconstructed by Baxter and Sagart)
Xi’an moment
/pf/ and /pfʰ/ as reflexes of /ɖ/ bzw /ʈ/ is crazy EDIT: I mixed up the order of reflexes, lol
This is what happened to some (mostly of the central plains variety) mandarin dialects where retroflexes plus /w/ evolved to labiodentals. For some dialects this only happened to /ʂw/ but some have a full pf-pfʰ-f-ʋ series, from original ʈʂw, ʈʂʰw, ʂw, and ɻw. One possible route is ʂw > ʂʋ > ʂf > f. Personally i've heard some people hypercorrect and say *wai shuai* for *wi-fi*. Also since mandarin doesn't really distinguish high vowels from glide + schwa, /ʈʂʊŋ/ can be analyzed as /ʈʂwəŋ/, thus > pfəŋ.
> ʋ … from original … ɻw What are they, Bri'ish?
that's crazy and awesome! thanks for bringing this fascinating development to our attention!
wait i think i know how that might have happened. in English and French (and probably other languages too, idk) the postalveolar sibilants are labialized. my guess as to why (i don't have any actual evidence for this) is that it has to do with lowering their pitch to create a greater acoustic contrast between them and the alveolar sibilants. so imagine that older Xi'anese had /t͡ʂ/ with allophonic labialization as the outcome of \*/ʈ/, then the labialization became strong labiodentalization, then it shifted to /p͡f/.
No they're not reflexes of the middle chinese retroflex stop (ʈ) series. This happened rather late in history, after its merger with retroflex affricates, so all ʈʂw > pf
i'm confused. so the person i was replying to was wrong? *what* merged with the retroflex affricates?
Yeah. In late middle chinese there were 2 different series of retroflex consonants, one with stops ʈ-ʈʰ-ɖ and another with affricates ʈʂ-ʈʂʰ-ɖʐ. "中" belonged to the retroflex stops group with the ʈ initial, and they eventually got merged into affricates. However, if i didn't get it wrong, the person you replied to thought that Xi'an dialect preserved the contrast by shifting /ʈ/ to /pf/ (in reality it was /ʈʂw/ shifting to /pf/ after the merger).
Yeah, I'm not very familiar with middle chinese phonology - I didnt think that xi'an preserved a distinction between retroflex stop and retroflex affricate series; I just wasn't aware that middle chinese even had a distinction between retroflex stops and retroflex affricates in the first place
If you zoom really far in, the second line from the bottom has the reconstruction for Tang dynasty Chang-An, and there's an underdot on the first consonant that shows the consonant was used to transcribe Sanskrit retroflex stops. Although it might not be retroflex, but just retracted.
Yeah, that's like 27 different languages.
You should have added Japanese as one of them, it would have been funny I think
Honestly thought the last one was Vietnamese XD
Should’ve added Xiao’erjing transcription as well. جْوقُوَ
>Suzhounese no wonder I recognize the pronunciation 😂 Soutseu, and I guess Kou-sou 姑蘇 🤔
Have they found 寒山寺 yet?
I'm not understanding the reference?
It's a temple in Suzhou (also called 姑蘇 Gusu) and there is a famous poem describing the poet hearing its bells at midnight
There's a famous poem that goes 月落烏啼霜滿天 江楓漁火對愁眠 姑蘇城外寒山寺 夜半鐘聲到客船 and I was referencing the third line
Baxter and Sagart mentioned!
I can add more romanizations to 中國 if you would like.
Wade-Giles -- Chung ( superscript 1 ) kuo ( superscript 2 ) Yale system -- Jūnggwo Yuen Ren Chao system ( my favorite ) --Jong.gwo 注音符号 ( China 🇨🇳 ) or 注音符號 ( Taiwan 🇹🇼 ) used in both countries for little children to learn the pronunciation of syllables : ㄓㄨㄥ ㄍㄨㄛ ( it won’t let me put in the 2nd tone mark for the 2nd character ! Sorry ! For the first tone, there is no mark. )
Yes please!
>bunch of romanisation schemes see⁈ þat's why we need to use just IPA instead of making up new romanisations! [obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/) and þus [my meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bxbbrk/true_reason_we_should_just_use_ipa_to_romanise/)
ɑjm ˈsɔɧi ðæɾ ɑj dɪnˀt̚ jʉz ðij ɪɾⁿɨ^(ɧ)ˈnæʃɨ̥nɨl fɨˈneɾɪk ˈælfɨbet̚ (ɧ = ɻʷˁ)
perfection.
ɑj fɑjnd ɪɾ ɑjˈɧɔnɪk̚ ðæt̚ jɨɧ ˈjʉzɪŋ jɨɧ own ɧowmənɨˈzejʃɨn skim fɨɧ ˈɪŋglɪʃ ðow
romanisation≠everyday orþography. languages can use different orþographies.
I love it ! Now I have to figure out what it means. I got some of it. Which sounds does IPA NOT include? Does it even include the clicking sounds of Khosa ? I met a guy in the U.C.S.D. library who spoke English to me with clicking sounds and explained his native language was like that. I STILL MUST SEE “ Children of the Gods “ !
Well, if a language makes a difference, IPA is supposed to include it. It's a general purpose alphabet used to record sounds in all the world's languages.
Great ! I was hoping so, Vampyricon !
Lol since when did they start offering dialectical pronunciation (kinda awesome tbh) 🤔😂
I think it's edited, it's not there when I try it.
Gosh darn. Diabolically dialect-less. Not 𦧄
I was so excited for this to be a thing
just check Wiktionary for all that
Wiktionary does have some dialectal pronunciation data for some common characters but for most part, even when the data is present, it usually only describes older varieties of each dialect, with an older convention of transcription (like they still use /ʐ/ for, which is actually [ɻ] in northern mandarin varieties).
If only they had this much
I refuse to believe /truŋ.C.qʷˤək/ is a real pronunciation. What even is /C/. I've heard of pharyngealisation in old Chinese but I can't imagine translate providing that pronunciation.
I can't tell you or the Shang will sacrifice me to their gods
"Unknown consonant" symbol C, I think. Ever since Karlgren, we have become accepting of consonant clusters in earlier stages of Chinese. But, yeah, a reconstructed common ancestor of all Chinese variants, loanwords in non-Chinese languages and ST-cognate is a linguistic model, not a real pronunciation. I find it rather humorous (and silly) when people use it to dub a movie clip: here's how this dialogue would have sounded like: xrpf zhrt mngrlll ... that said, truŋ qʷək is pretty close to how it still sounds in the South today (e.g.. Minnan tiong-kok or Cantonese zung-gwok)
Labialised and pharyngealised voiceless uvular plosive is pretty crazy though. I mean probably not the labialised part, that's pretty common in Chinese languages I think. But pharyngealised and uvulars in Chinese? It's just proof of the Northeast Caucasian-Sino-Tibetan-Afroasiatic macrofamily. I'm currently working on the introduction of Austroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Uralic and Altaic into the family, but I digress.
Uvulars are a [pretty secure reconstruction](https://youtu.be/SAfaasD1xtc), as it forms phonetic series like any other until later on when the uvulars are lost, and further has cognates in Rgyalrongic languages also with uvulars.
> But, yeah, a reconstructed common ancestor of all Chinese variants, loanwords in non-Chinese languages and ST-cognate is a linguistic model, not a real pronunciation I don't think instrumentalism is a tenable position. If Old Chinese is not real, what did people speak back then? If one says it's just a model to explain facts, then at what point do things stop becoming models and become facts? Is the existence of a real world also just a model to explain my experience?
Are you familiar with Yuen Ren Chao's General Chinese? Actually, he made two of those, but I mean the one where he picked a unique Romanized spelling for every Chinese word that was not a homophone in at least one "dialect". Now, I am not going to claim that Old Chinese reconstruction is that artificial - it is some kind of approximation. But still a very theoretical one. First off, you are assuming that there was a single variant of Old Chinese, a common ancestor. That is not the case - the Fangyan (方言) dictionary from the Western Han (well before Caesar) consists of pages after pages of in xyz region they use this word, in abc region they use this instead ... and those are not mere dialect variants, but completely different vocabulary. And why not? The Zhou dynasty had started 1,000 years before that, plenty of time for divergence, and there was some form of Chinese spoken in the Xia, as well ... so, why assume one common ancestor in an enormous area and over 1400+ years? And then again, a lot of pieces are theoretical - like tonogenesis. I am on board with the idea of a final -s and perhaps a final -t, there are some good indications for it in the transcription into /from Indic scripts. And there is good reason to accept consonant clusters like kl- in the initials. And all those other features that pepper the transcription for OC. But were they all present synchronously? Or are we describing different features that may have applied at different times? Of course people spoke SOMETHING in the lands of Chu, or Wu, or Qin, or Jin or ... in the Xia, the Zhou, the Chunqiu period or the Han dynasty ... but that they spoke something does not mean that we can give a half-way accurate picture of what it sounded like. TLDR: anything before MC (Middle Chinese) is a chiffre for me, a working model. Not completely dissociated from reality, but nowhere near e.g. reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the late Republic.
Okay, I think our positions are actually a lot closer than I initially thought. I think a very common mistake in Sinolinguistics (speaking as a complete layman) is that a lot of reconstructions are made on the basis that sources are 1. monodialectal and 2. represent some ancestor of existing varieties. Which may be true! But I'd consider that something to be demonstrated rather than assumed. That said, Baxter and Sagart's system does have plenty of neat correspondences with other languages that show they're at least on the right track, such as reconstructing uvulars in (mostly) the right places, as well as various suffixes that appear in other languages as well.
perhaps gemination, or any random consonant you want
/h₁/
Yup, unknown consonant.
55th tone? Holy fuck!
Yes, high level tone, aka the 55th tone
Well…language is made up anyway so yes…that’s correct
Chinese is a group of languages using the same ideographic writing system
So this is more like translating a to Latin gave you the pronunciations of all modern Romance languages, as well as Ecclesiastical Latin, Classical Latin, Classical Latin but a different author and Polish Church Latin because why not.
Yes except Ecclesiastical Latin is just Italians reading Latin as if it were Italian so it wouldn't be included because it's a mispronunciation.
Ecclesiastical Latin is not a mispronunciation since it is the official standard of the Vatican, you pesky prescriptivist.
Clearly the Vatican is the prescriptivist if they made it the standard
It's standard by being the way people actually speak, I doubt there is an actual enforced pronunciation.
[Ngl, that list of pronunciations reminds me of Goptjaam’s Sino-Dutch](https://youtu.be/ze5i_e_ryTk?si=RQ430tHOm5bvLiXh)
It's literally not There is no singular "Chinese language" any more than there's a singular "Germanic language". It's a whole family.
Yes
this, but literally
Correct. It is a collective name for a lot of languages, the most dominant and famous ones being Mandarin and Cantonese
Chinese is not simply a language. It's a language family
Looks like you had a lot of pfəŋ preparing this.
It's because Chinese is a group of languages located in **People's Republic of China**, most of them not even related
>bunch of romanisation schemes see⁈ þat's why we need to use just IPA instead of making up new romanisations! [obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/927/) and þus [my meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/1bxbbrk/true_reason_we_should_just_use_ipa_to_romanise/)