jogloran

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I am a computational linguistics PhD candidate. But before that, long before that, I fell in love with languages.

By the way, if you're addicted to Stack Exchange and use iOS, check out Stackwise for iOS and browse Stack Exchange beautifully.

	888 reputation	bio	website	overpunch.com	visits	member for	1 year, 3 months
29 badges		location	Sydney, Australia		seen	17 hours ago

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Mar 30	comment	Using 變音 when reading Classical Chinese poetry in Cantonese I guessed that the tone constraints would settle this, but I wasn't sure if they applied to this style of poetry. Thanks for the details.
Mar 11	comment	How to describe differences between Cantonese and Mandarin? This answer is closer to the truth. I opened my copy of 汉语方言词汇 and picked ten words randomly: 切，台阶，整齐，亲戚，拍马，电筒，嘴，打冷颤，钱，蜂蜜. Only two of them are completely different in Cantonese (台阶 and 拍马), one of them is clearly cognate to the Cantonese (打冷颤), and two of them have the characters reversed in Cantonese (整齐, 蜂蜜).
Mar 11	comment	How to describe differences between Cantonese and Mandarin? Sadly also wrong. Cantonese and Mandarin may not be as close as American and British English, as another erroneous answer says, but to say they have only the written word in common is wrong, very wrong.
Mar 7	comment	Cantonese jyutping Tone 4 question “throat should be vibrating” @dda: Independent of the distinction between a and aa, tone 3 has longer duration.
Mar 6	comment	Cantonese jyutping Tone 4 question “throat should be vibrating” I've recorded the six tones in an audio file here: cl.ly/420Z2n1y2u1c -- Ultimately, the tone numbers are only a rough indication. You can listen to recordings of native speakers, but every speaker has a different dynamic range.
Jan 23	comment	Resources for learning Cantonese (I just noticed, the jyutping should of course be bin3jam1...)
Jan 22	comment	Resources for learning Cantonese @StumpyJoePete: The best resource I've found on pin3jam1, as the phenomenon is sometimes called, is in Bauer & Benedict (1997) "Modern Cantonese Phonology". To answer your question, it's not regularly triggered by anything. The comparison to erhua is appropriate; like it, pin3jam1 has among its functions a non-productive noun->verb derivational affix, a verb->noun derivational affix and a marker of familiarity.
Jan 22	comment	Resources for learning Cantonese It's not often pointed out that the phonology of Hong Kong Cantonese is actually less alien to most English speakers than Standard Mandarin. The only sounds which aren't present for many speakers of English are the vowels [y] and [œ], and marginally also syllable-initial [ŋ] (which young HK speakers drop anyway). Standard Mandarin has the retroflex and palatal series, as well as [ɤ], which pose problems for a lot of learners. There are indeed 6 tones in Hong Kong Cantonese, but on the other hand there isn't tone sandhi like there is in Mandarin.
Dec 9	comment	Dissimilation of bilabial finals following Middle Chinese (法, 品, 凡) Thanks for a well-researched answer. I suspected there would be literature about this. Do any of the references suggest when the change took place? As I said above, the fact that Korean borrowings preserve final -m and -p in these cases allows the date of the sound change to be bounded on one side.
Dec 7	comment	Dissimilation of bilabial finals following Middle Chinese (法, 品, 凡) I only know that it would have happened before the main borrowing of Chinese readings into Korean, since those preserve the original finals. As for your second question, let's use Cantonese: 品 became ban2 and 凡 became faan4: bilabial finals became alveolar finals.
Dec 7	comment	Dissimilation of bilabial finals following Middle Chinese (法, 品, 凡) That's obvious. We're talking about Middle Chinese here. However, Cantonese has bilabial finals, yet 法 is faat3 because of this dissimilation instead of faap3.
Dec 7	comment	Dissimilation of bilabial finals following Middle Chinese (法, 品, 凡) Oops, true. It's just place of articulation then.
Nov 15	comment	What is etymology for 沙龙? ステーション is more usual. Not sure, but japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/901/… may be relevant.
Nov 1	comment	Etymology of 其他 It's more likely that 其の他 arose as a calque of 其他.
Nov 1	comment	Are there more special numerals like 廿? How is 廿 pronounced in Shanghainese?
Oct 8	comment	Why do Chinese translations of English names sound very inaccurate? Neither statement is correct. The Japanese <r> is a flap, and the only comparable thing in an English dialect is the alveolar tap in rapid speech for some speakers in butter.
Sep 6	comment	What is the Mandarin equivalent for the Shanghai term for dirty? Interesting. I wonder if it's cognate to Cantonese 污糟 `wu1 zou1`. The tones would suggest not, though.
Sep 2	comment	How to describe differences between Cantonese and Mandarin? To my chagrin this whole thread is rife with mischaracterisations about the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin. On the subject of Cantonese syntax absent from Mandarin, I'll list a few examples: reduced frequency of the 把 (ba) and 被 (bei) constructions, bare classifier+noun with definite reading, dative shift (as found in English), a richer system of modal particles.
Sep 2	comment	How to describe differences between Cantonese and Mandarin? This answer is imprecise in a number of ways. The usual reflex of 不 in Cantonese is 唔 (Jyutping `m4`), and 不 `bat1` when rendering Mandarin text or in set phrases. Secondly, Mandarin syllables can end in the null coda, or /n/, or /ŋ/, while Cantonese syllables can also end in /p/, /t/, /k/ or /m/. Third, the resemblance between Cantonese and Korean is superficial, only explained by the fact that Korean borrowed readings from Chinese when it still preserved those codas.
Aug 29	comment	How to describe differences between Cantonese and Mandarin? @Krazer: Thanks for your reply. It's true that Cantonese stops are unreleased in final position, and it's true that a syllable with a null onset (regardless of whether the previous syllable ends in a stop) begins with a glottal stop. However, it's still not correct that "since they are unreleased, they are considered glottal stops". It's true that some Min (and Wu) languages have phonemic glottal stops in final position, but Cantonese does not. That said, I'm only familiar with Standard Cantonese.