L=N, a sound you won’t hear in Beijing

A sound you almost certainly will get to hear in Beijing someday, if you’re so fortunate, is the sound of Lǐ Chuányùn 李传韵 fiddling. The Qingdao native is a world phenomenon and the recipient of a loan instrument from the Stradivari society. What you won’t hear from Beijingers, though, is his particular flavor of Mandarin. More on that in a sec.

Li, the fiddle player

I only learned of Li a couple weeks ago through one of those dizzying Internet experiences in which ideas network with technology to lead you to things you’re sure you never would have found ten years ago. Courtesy of an off-topic music post from Adsotrans (great Mandarin-English-pinyin technology there — more on this another day), I heard a YouTube recording of pianist Timur Sergeyenia. That gave me the idea of seeing what YouTube might offer from some of my favorite composers.

As a (crappy and erstwhile) violinist, that led naturally to Paganini, which led to the clip below of Lǐ Chuányùn on the 24th caprice. Now if you don’t know the piece, it’s probably worth listening to it played straight before indulging in this. Here’s a very masterful rendition from Paganini look-alike, Alexander Markov.

OK, now Mr. Li:

Whoa. That virtuoso piece not hard enough for you?! Hey, sex it up and make it even harder. That’s what I’d do, if I could.

Now in a bit of preemption for those who would disdain Li’s version because it is (1) not true to tradition, and (2) a wee bit sloppy in places, I’ll just put in a reminder that Paganini was a showman’s showman. He would’ve loved this stuff. And on the “sloppy” front? First, from what little I’ve read of the historical record, I know there are at least rumors that Paganini wasn’t infallible as a virtuoso and that perhaps he himself never played the 24 caprices in public because they were too damn hard. But that’s really beside the point, because that’s not the case with Li Chuanyun. Listen to some of the other stuff that’s out there and it’s clear he could play the piece straight and technically perfect if he wanted to — he’s just having fun.

Li, the Mandarin speaker

Now switching to language, is there anything about his dialect that you won’t hear in Beijing? Seems like the answer might be yes. Listen to this snippet below (or link to the video here). The context is that he had just been telling the host that his mother spanked him sometimes to make him practice when he was young.

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Host: 那你爸爸呢?
nà nǐ bàba ne?
And what about your dad?

Li: 有的时候他也会打。
yǒude shíhou tā yě huì dǎ.
Sometimes he’d also hit (me)

他就拿那个冷水儿泼我,对,好像是
Tā jiù ná nèige něng shuǐr pō wǒ, duì, hǎoxiàng shì
He’d just take some cold water and splash me, something like that

Host: 我觉得你爸挺逗拿冷水泼你呀 [corrected: thanks commenter Zou Dong]
wǒ juéde nǐ bà tǐng dòu ná lěngshuǐ pō nǐ yā
I think your dad is pretty funny, splashing cold water on you

Li: 对,有一次
duì, yǒu yīcì
Yeah, there was a time

Host: 为什么呢?
wèishénme yā?
Why was that?

他不敢真打我
tā bùgǎn zhēn dǎ wǒ
He didn’t really dare to hit me

但是他又想给我一点,
dànshì tā yòu xiǎng gěi wǒ yīdiǎn,
but he wanted to give me a little

就是说,厉害看看所以只好这样
jiùshì shuō, lìhai kànkan, suǒyǐ zhǐhǎo zhèiyàng
say, a ferocious look, so this is how he made me do it

He sounds something like a Beijinger, right? But what’s going on with that néngshuǐr?!

The er-ization of shuǐ would be perfectly reasonable for a Beijinger. It fits nicely with the diminutive tendency of 儿 that several readers pointed out earlier (in the tang-tangr post). In this case, the gloss for “néng shuǐr” might be “a little bit of cold water” instead of “some cold water.”

L≠N in Beijing

The claim I’m going to make here is that changing L to N (i.e. něng instead of lěng) sharply distinguishes Li’s flavor of Mandarin from the Mandarin of běijīnghuà. A Beijinger just wouldn’t do it… I think.

[Update later Mar 9: but does Li really pronounce an N? There's disagreement in the comments below and maybe I've got to clean out my ears. Listen to it in isolation here

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]

Interesting if true, and I like the idea of understanding Beijing dialect for what it isn’t as well as what it is. You can’t really understand it without knowing what goes on elsewhere. A different example of “what běijīnghuà isn’t” came up the other day in Sima’s Wood-Pear-Bell post as well. The recording he has is a dōngběirén 东北人 and he notes that she pronounces /shu/ as /su/ as is common in that region. As I stated in the comments, I’m pretty sure Beijingers almost never do this although it’s very common in other areas, not just dōngběi 东北.

Is it really true that you don’t get L=N from Beijingers? I’ll be curious to hear what others can document. I’m also curious about the parallel question: Which dialects of Mandarin does this happen in? I don’t know enough to say if it’s a Qingdao thing, or if Li Chuanyun might have picked it up from his time in HK, or what.

But I’m still pretty sure it’s not remotely a characteristic of běijīnghuà. The only flicker of doubt in my mind comes from… well, indulge a story if you would:

Nike a diamond in the guy

Princess Beijing Sounds was a precocious talker by age 2, spewing out a pleasant (to her parents) mix of Western US English and Beijing Mandarin, perhaps a little heavier on the latter than the former since Grandma Beijing Sounds (a lifelong Beijinger) has been with us since she was born. Like any other kid, she had her developmental stages, beginning most notably with speaking everything as a single syllable with no final consonant (e.g. “park” becomes “pa”) so that friends could only shake their heads when her doting parents claimed they understood what she was saying.

We were enlightened parents and took it all in stride. No rush to speech therapy. Patience. And, sure enough, full syllables came quickly.

Later on we might have been slightly concerned when we heard her skipping the initial S of any consonant cluster. But again I thought, “Just a stage.” And the closet linguist in me liked how, when dropping the S, she voiced the next consonant (as it actually is, rather than how the spelling might make us think). A couple of my favorite transformations:

straw => draw
spoon => boon
school bus => ghoul bus

But the one that gave us several months of worry as well as endless amusement was that she mixed up her L and N. Or maybe L mostly became N.

“How could that possibly be?!” we asked ourselves. It doesn’t happen in běijīnghuà, at least to my knowledge. Neither is it a developmental stage that I’m familiar with in English, like how we know lots of kids say a W instead of an R.

Of course that stage eventually went away too, and now we can only think back on it fondly. But we were always mystified about where L=N came from. I still suspect that it was related to Mandarin, somehow, since we have a good friend from 四川 who never has been able to master the distinction. I have a pet theory but no evidence that the language sounds are evolving that direction. Maybe I’ll try to find a real expert in the field to weigh in on the issue.

In any case, I’ve dug around but been unable to find a recording from those no-S-no-L days. Alas. All I can sign off with is this later recording, just a year or so later but long after she’d mastered the L and S. Just try, if you will, to mentally substitute the following lyrics:

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[Note that at first the lyrics are set to the tune of "Daisy, Daisy"]

Twinkle twinkle little dar
How I wonder what you are
Ba ba ba the world so high
Nike a diamond in the guy

Twinkle twinkle little dar
How I wonder what you are

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Comments 36

  1. Sima wrote:

    Glad to see you’ve nothing better to do. Though better use of your time than this is hard to imagine. Lovely post.

    Sounds to me that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ recording has got a little scrambled – may just be at my end, but the Li Chuanyun recording seems fine.

    On first listen to Mr Li, I didn’t even notice the ‘n’ – I don’t think it’s as striking as some I’ve heard – but it is there. Seems almost to be a blend – neither one thing nor the other.

    It’s quite a while since I’ve been to Qingdao and I recall Shandong generally having some interesting variations, but I don’t remember noticing that one. Perhaps a Qingdao resident could confirm. Intriguing if he picked it up elsewhere.

    N-L is something I would think of as very southern. But I’ve not quite pinned down its range. I think you’re right about Sichuan and I hear it from a couple of friends from Hunan. They seem to pronounce ‘Hunan’ as (to my ears)’Fulan’ – where the H/F seems to be produced wholly with the lips (bilabial fricative?). Can anyone tell us about other parts of the south?

    Posted 08 Mar 2008 at 8:43 pm
  2. Zou Dong wrote:

    It should be:
    Host: 我觉得你爸“挺”逗 “拿”冷水泼你呀
    wǒ juéde nǐ bà tǐng dòu ná lěngshuǐ pō nǐ yā
    I guess your dad teased about splashing cold water on you

    P.S. He pronunced lěngshuǐ which is right, just like the host did, not “něngshuǐ”.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 3:55 am
  3. syz wrote:

    Sima & Zou Dong: Since both of you, in the first two comments, took issue with whether Li actually says “něng” instead of “lěng”, my immediate assumption was that I just screwed up. And it’s a pretty red-faced kind of mistake, since that’s the most prominent example in the post :^)

    But after listening again (and again and again and again), I’m still in doubt. I isolated it and put it into the post above. See what you think. It may be that this one instance is just too brief to be decisive. I realize I’d make my case better if I had multiple examples — and that’s probably my bad for not following my own “keep it empirical and provable” advice. But in my sorry defense, most of the Li recordings out there are music, not interviews, and when he does talk he tends to mumble.

    Let me know what you think. Zou Dong: also thanks for the correction — now it actually makes sense. I just couldn’t get that quite right.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 5:24 am
  4. Sima wrote:

    Ai! Really feel for you on this one syz. On listening to the whole thing in context again, I was still inclined to agree with you. I listened half a dozen times, still convinced you were at least half right, even after a native Chinese speaker wandered over and sided quite firmly with Zou Dong. The power of suggestion, eh.

    Listening, now, to the seperate recording, I’m afraid I’m going to have to switch sides. It really is an ‘L’.

    Just to rub it in, the following link is another interview. You’re right, he’s a real mumbler, albeit a rather engaging one, but around 3min 30sec you can hear both ‘liǎng’ 两, and ‘líng’灵, and I would say they are pretty clear ‘L’s.

    http://tinyurl.com/23j2aj

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 6:47 am
  5. trevelyan wrote:

    Joining the chorus, I hear the “L” here too….

    On a related note, I’ve always wondered is why people add the 儿 to the end of “shui” anyway. Water isn’t small. It isn’t cute. I’m not sure if “shuir” is Beijinghua or Hubeihua, but it sure threw me for a loop the first time I ran into it trying to buy mineral water.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 7:43 am
  6. Randy Alexander wrote:

    I definitely hear the ‘n’. But listening to more of the interview, I don’t hear it anywhere else.

    He’s not particularly clear, and might be described as having a 大舌头, which would certainly account for doing the ‘n’ thing only once.

    Li’s arrangement is a lot of fun. And the Markov version is pristine. I’m not a big fan of Paganini (or virtuoso pomposity in general), but the Markov was like a breath of fresh air; it’s the first time I’ve ever heard a Paganini caprice not sound strained.

    Oh, and the Twinkle Twinkle Little Dar: unless your daughter’s current developmental stage is ’sounding like a chipmunk’, then you should take a look at that recording. Maybe it was recorded at the wrong bit rate.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 7:52 am
  7. Randy Alexander wrote:

    trevelyan: 儿化 is often an objectivizer, like 子.

    A former student of mine told me that only nouns can have 儿化, except one verb: 玩儿. I haven’t noticed any others. Has anyone else?

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 8:02 am
  8. syz wrote:

    OK, I think I fixed the bit rate on the Twinkle Twinkle. Funny it always worked fine for me.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 8:19 am
  9. Zou Dong wrote:

    In my observation, some southerners which are older or uneducated in Putonghua (Mandarin) may pronounce “L” instead of “N”, such as wǒ néng(我能, “I can”) can be pronounced wǒ léng by them. But fewer people make such mistakes. There are seven major dialects in China, but in my opinion, southerners can accept the standard Mandarin which is on CCTV rather than some northern dialects, Henan dialects or Dongbei dialects, etc.
    Even Beijing dialect is not so standard compared to Broadcaster.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 5:47 pm
  10. Albert wrote:

    I think it’s an “l” but it’s mighty hard to say for sure.

    As for how far that L=N mixup ranges in China, I can tell you for certain I’ve run into it in Jiangxi, Yunnan, Hunan (”Fulan”–I hear you loud and clear on that Sima), but no place more than Guangdong. It seems to be, like buildings that aren’t allowed to have central heating, restricted to south of the Changjiang river. It’s a big problem for English students who seem to oscillate between liking stamp connecting and niking stamp collecting. I’ve never met a Northerner who had that problem though.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 8:33 pm
  11. Randy Alexander wrote:

    When I was in college, I had a girlfriend from Hong Kong who was a piano major. Instead of “prelude”, she said “play-nude”! : )

    Yeah, it’s definitely a southern thing.

    Posted 09 Mar 2008 at 10:09 pm
  12. Sima wrote:

    syz, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ sounds fine now. Too cute. But the helium-induced version had a lot going for it.

    Zou Dong, the age thing is certainly a big factor. Younger ones seem much less likely to have problems, though I do encounter the odd one from time to time. I guess the effort to popularise putonghua has been pretty successful already, but I still think it can be more fun talking with old folk and hearing a bit more local character.

    Can you think of any examples to show the difference between Beijing dialect and standard Mandarin?

    Albert, I think you could open a whole new discipline there if you could just prove the link between central heating and L-N confusion.

    Posted 10 Mar 2008 at 12:36 am
  13. Zou Dong wrote:

    Sima, the most obvious distinction between Bejing dialect and standard Mandarin (which can be represented by broadcaster’s way of pronunciation) may be the use of er 儿化.
    Such as “蝴蝶(húdié)”, butterfly in standard Mandarin, can be pronounced “húdiěr” by Beijing folks.

    also, “和(hé)” used to be spoken “hàn” by old folks, now it is used in Taiwan Mandarin, means “and”.
    “告诉(gàosu)”could be “gàosong”,to tell.

    “侵略” was spoken “qīn lüè” by someone, while “qǐn lüè” by other folks;”附近” could be spoken “fùjìn” or “fǔjìn”. But in standard Mandarin, they can only be pronounced “qīn lüè” and “fùjìn”.

    Further information, http://baike.baidu.com/view/4591.htm

    Posted 10 Mar 2008 at 4:56 am
  14. Sima wrote:

    Thanks for the link, Zou Dong. There’s some good stuff in there. I’ve just a vague recollection of hearing “gàosong”, or something similar, spoken by an old lady up here in the Northeast. I remember questioning it at the time and being told it was an ‘old’ pronunciation. I’ve just a suspicion that I sometimes hear “qǐn lüè” and “fǔjìn” from time to time. I’ll have to start paying more attention.

    Posted 10 Mar 2008 at 7:03 pm
  15. Andrew Galbraith wrote:

    Sima’s comment about “Hunan” becoming “Fulan” is interesting to me, as a former student of Japanese. In that language, the “F” sound is really half-way to an “H.” I don’t know the proper linguistic terminology behind the difference, but basically the mouth is much more relaxed than in an English (or standard Mandarin) F. I wasn’t aware that some regions of China also tended to mix the two.

    As for the whole L/N thing, I think life in Hong Kong and Shanghai has made me susceptible to mixing the two. I was recently in Lebanon, where I clearly thought I heard the Arabic word for “No” — “La” — as “Na.”

    Posted 16 Mar 2008 at 11:47 pm
  16. Sima wrote:

    Andrew,

    I don’t know anything about Japanese, but the following link maybe of some help:

    http://wapedia.mobi/en/Japanese_phonology

    At a quick scan, it appears that Japanese employs /ɸ/ (bilabial) as well as /h/ and the adjacent vowel can have a bearing on which is used. Does that fit with your experience?

    Posted 17 Mar 2008 at 5:22 pm
  17. Andrew Galbraith wrote:

    Hmm… I think that sounds about right. There is a definite “H” sound in Japanese — “Nihon” (Japan), “Higashi” (East), and “Hachi” (Eight) all use a clear H. The F/H crossover only occurs when the subsequent vowel is a “u” (ɯ, according to your link). I wonder if the people form “Fulan” only switch their Hs in similar circumstances.

    Of course, I haven’t studied or spoken Japanese in years, but this seems to agree with what I remember.

    Posted 17 Mar 2008 at 7:07 pm
  18. Sima wrote:

    I’m wondering the same thing. I have an neighbour who, despite living up here in the NE for 30-40 years, still produces ‘Fulan’ when he’s not being careful. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mix ‘han’ and ‘fan’ but I’ll have to pop round and see him in the next few days and listen carefully.

    I’ve just found the book from the phonology course I took last year (I hope syz will forgive my mentioning it) and it suggests that Japanese and Korean students often produce the /ɸ/ in hu, huan, hou, hong. Will see how that comapres with my neighbour.

    Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 12:28 am
  19. syz wrote:

    Sima — What’s this “forgive” stuff? I can’t figure out the sin. I love this squishy phoneme stuff. Andrew has inspired me to tell my my “fucking lot” ESL story, which I’ll do when I get a sec.

    Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 1:24 am
  20. Sima wrote:

    syz, I know you like to avoid mentions of textbooks. As for your esl story…I’m intrigued.

    Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 1:36 am
  21. Andrew Galbraith wrote:

    I don’t know that I’ve ever inspired anyone to do *anything*. I’m intrigued, too…

    Posted 19 Mar 2008 at 1:47 am
  22. David Marjanović wrote:

    Water isn’t small. It isn’t cute.

    Vodka.

    There is a definite “H” sound in Japanese — “Nihon” (Japan), “Higashi” (East), and “Hachi” (Eight) all use a clear H.

    Not in my very limited experience with Japanese, where every vowel seems to trigger a different realization of /h/: hi is [çi], ha is more or less [xa].

    My native language is German, which has both [ç] and [x]*, so perhaps I notice things that a native English speaker is more likely to miss…

    * Both written ch; the pronunciation depends mostly on the preceding vowel.

    Posted 26 May 2008 at 4:54 pm
  23. Sandra wrote:

    one of my former sons-in-law (I have three) is a Nanjing ren–lived in Nanjing until he was about 25–and whose mother is from Anhui. His N-L thing was very heavy–”you’re lice” instead of “you’re nice;” “Nu-la” instead of “Luna,” the name of a mutual friend.

    Posted 09 Nov 2008 at 6:03 am
  24. hsknotes wrote:

    The L-N “issue” is alive and well in Taiwan, including Taibei. There I ran into the issue of having to figure out that 愣 was being pronounced at neng, and the other party had no idea of any alternate pronunciation. This sort of thing is obviously common there.

    As for the recording, you hear the ‘n’ at first, and when you listen carefully you can hear the ‘l’ I think this means its a cross/between the two, which is something I’ve never really wanted to accept. Especially when people tell me there are crosses between letters/sounds which I don’t think can be crossed: “oh, it’s like a cross between a ‘k’ and ‘z’” “No, there is no cross between those period!”

    Posted 29 Jan 2009 at 1:27 am
  25. syz wrote:

    @hsknotes — that’s what I love about L=N! It crosses a phonemic boundary that, to English speakers, feels like crossing the Berlin wall in 1982 — practically unthinkable.

    Posted 29 Jan 2009 at 7:15 pm
  26. H. R. Blutvergießen wrote:

    Sorry for poking an old thread, but do you think Korean [su] for “水” and [nɛŋ] for “冷” might be related to the shu→su and leng→neng mentioned here? Is this a general thing in the extreme East / Northeast? I didn’t know there were Mandarin speakers who use these pronunciations, and I don’t know any Mandarin myself.

    Posted 28 May 2009 at 1:26 pm
  27. syz wrote:

    H. R. Blutvergießen, no need at all to apologize. I love scraping the scabs off of old wounds continual exploration myself, especially on a day when I’m supposed to be working on a report for a client.

    Alas I have no answer. Assuming both words were borrowed from Chinese into Korean at some point, the historical question might be whether they were borrowed in as [su] and [nɛŋ] originally, perhaps from northeasterners, or whether they evolved that way independently.

    If somehow I can get Zev Handel back to this post he might have an idea, as I believe he’s pretty knowledgeable about historical aspects of both languages.

    Posted 28 May 2009 at 1:42 pm
  28. H. R. Blutvergießen wrote:

    Shortly after I posted the above I remembered that the standard Korean pronunciations [su] and [nɛŋ] are easily explained by the language’s native (i.e. non-Sino-Korean) constituent lacking [ʃu] and word-initial l/r, although I wonder whether these restrictions are in turn somehow related to the corresponding replacements seemingly occuring in some NE dialects of Mandarin, which would be interesting since Manchu seems to have no problem with word-initial L and a sequence like [-ʃu-]. Once you accept the premise of no l-/r- and no [ʃu], n- and [su] do seem like obvious candidates to use instead to pronounce imported words, so these might as well be totally unrelated to the Mandarin phenomenon. (I do know that people used the iotised spelling sywuy for 水 (modern swu) in old hankul, and that iotisation in *today’s* orthography means s→ʃ, but I am at a loss as to how different speakers of Korean would have actually pronounced those, especially since AFAIU old hankul’s standard-conscious spellings clashed with popular pronunciation at times.)

    Posted 29 May 2009 at 5:01 am
  29. Zev Handel wrote:

    @H. R. Blutvergießen: The lack of l-/r- word-initially in Korean is a long-standing native restriction that predates borrowings from Chinese. (The restriction is only now starting to disappear under the influence of English borrowing.) There are no native Korean roots beginning with this sound. As a result of this restriction, Chinese l- was borrowed into Korean as n- or zero, depending on the following vowel. To my knowledge there is no evidence that developments in Northern varieties of Chinese were involved.

    As for [su], Middle Korean spellings do indeed indicate an original /sju/ (슈). There was once a distinction in Korean between what you refer to as iotised and non-iotised vowels after the sibilant series, but this distinction later disappeared, and eventually the Korean spellings were revised to reflect the loss of the distinction.

    @ everyone else: On the matter of n- and l-, it’s important to realize that in phonetic terms there is not a simple binary distinction between these two sounds. There are a whole series of pronunciations on the spectrum between [l] (an oral alveolar lateral approximant) and [n] (a nasal alveolar stop). For example, one can pronounce a nasalized l-, which is what I think Lǐ Chuányùn is doing in this audio clip. Air is flowing through the nose, as with n-, but the tongue is positioned so that there is also lateral airflow through the mouth. Whether this sounds to you more like a prototypical n- or l- will depend in part on your native language and in part on other factors. Given the lack of n-/l- alternation elsewhere in his speech, I suspect that this particular example is a production error on Lǐ’s part, most likely due to anticipatory nasalization because of the upcoming -ng at the end of lěng.

    Posted 30 May 2009 at 3:28 pm
  30. Zev Handel wrote:

    @andrew, sima: When pronouncing an [u] vowel, the lips are rounded and close together. When an [h] is pronounced in front of [u], it can easily happen that some frication occurs at the point where the lips are close together in anticipation of the [u]. This frication is what changes the [h] to an [f]-like sound. In Japanese, the sound is technically a bilabial fricative [ɸ]. Unlike an English [f], in which the upper teeth touch the lower lip, the Japanese sound is produced with the two lips very close together, but not touching. (The teeth aren’t involved.)

    You’ll note that in Chinese dialects with f-/h- interchange (as in many dialects of Hunan), it is in fact only before the vowel [u] that a change to f- occurs, thus 花 huā is pronounced fā, but 很 hěn does not become fěn.

    Posted 30 May 2009 at 3:43 pm
  31. H. R. Blutvergießen wrote:

    Thank you for your helpful answers! If no developments in Northern varieties of Chinese were involved, perhaps it was the other way round? But I guess that would overestimate any effect Korean pronunciation could have had on NE Chinese, especially with the restrictions on freedom of movement and settlement in the region. It looks like if there is a regionalism, it is entirely coincidental, which would not be unlikely given how, for example, Romanian, Albanian, and Burmese also apparently have phonetic similarities with Korean despite being unrelated and geographically remote. (I just noticed looking at Wikipedia’s article on the Balkan sprachbund, phonetics section.)

    Posted 30 May 2009 at 11:22 pm
  32. Zev Handel wrote:

    The developments in Korean and northern Chinese really aren’t that parallel. In the Chinese dialects spoken closest to Korea, such as Beijing, the Northeastern Dialects, and the Jiao-Liao dialects of the Qingdao peninsula, word-initial l- is common, and retroflexes are alive and well. So I don’t see much evidence of sprachbund-like convergence between Chinese and Korean. (Forms of Chinese that lack retroflexes and have n-/l- confusion are farther south.)

    Posted 31 May 2009 at 3:31 pm
  33. H. R. Blutvergießen wrote:

    Shucks, so my poor wee sprachbund is aborted early… Would have been nice, though. Have a nice week!

    Posted 01 Jun 2009 at 12:29 pm
  34. syz wrote:

    Gee too bad, so much for a newly discovered sprachbund in the comments of Beijing sounds…

    Zev, thanks for reminding us all about the fluidity of so-called N vs L (seems like there should be a bad time in there somewhere with “liquidity”).

    Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 8:22 am
  35. Claw wrote:

    @Zev: That’s an interesting note about the f-/h- interchange. I always wondered why certain words in Mandarin that have an hu- initial correspond to Cantonese words that have an f- initial (e.g., 虎 fu﹑花 fa﹑欢 fun﹑荒 fong﹑灰 fui﹑婚 fan﹑火 fo). Your theory definitely provides an explanation.

    Posted 20 Jul 2009 at 10:21 am
  36. Claw wrote:

    I should note that not all Mandarin hu- initial words correspond to Cantonese f- initial words though. All the other ones correspond to Cantonese w- initial; so it looks like the h- was completely dropped in those words (e.g., 湖 wu﹑华 wa﹑环 waan﹑黄 wong﹑回 wui﹑魂 wan﹑或 waak).

    Hmm… as I was writing this comment, I just noticed something interesting. All the ones that became f- in Cantonese have 阴 tones (which corresponded to unvoiced initial consonants in Middle Chinese) while all the ones that became w- have 阳 tones (which corresponded to voiced initial consonants in Middle Chinese).

    Posted 20 Jul 2009 at 10:34 am

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