Yue/Min/Wu/Gan/mandarin phonetic correspondance

Question

I am looking for a table of the regular phonetic correspondances between the different chinese varieties (Yue, Wu, Gan, Min, Mandarin...). For instance I noted a g (Yue)/j(mandarin) correspondance (e.g. ga/jia). There must be more, already documented.

Any advice where I can find descriptions of these correspondances on the Web? I can only find very high level considerations so far.

Thanks beforehand!

Answer 1

Most of them are descendants of Middle Chinese and each has undergone different development so they may not correspond to each other very well directly but they have a better correspondence to Middle Chinese.

Wiki has some good correspondence tables but you need to have some background linguistics knowledge to fully understand them:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中古聲母#中古與各方言、對音對應關係表

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/入聲#音系對比

Answer 2

Since the literary readings of the vernaculars of Sinitic languages are theoretically from Middle Chinese language, there may be some rules (which may have exceptions) of M.Ch. reading to literary reading of Mandarin/Cantonese/Taiwanese(Hokkien)/Hakka correspondence.

• For example, in the book 福爾摩沙的烙印--臺灣閩南語概要(下冊), there is a correspondent table of the onsets between M.Ch. and Taiwanese.

Besides, in Taiwan, there are some research papers by an associate professor Jia-peng Luo 駱嘉鵬 about the pronunciation correspondents between Minnan, Hakka and Mandarin.

• eg. 閩客語字音對應規律在客語聽辨能力學習上的應用 pp.8-12.