A Cantonese-influenced Old National Pronunciation (老國音) system

Question

I need advice/help on creating a system similar to the Old National Pronunciation system/language for a worldbuilding project called Roses, Tulips, and Liberty.

Some background: Imagines, it's a world in which China is partitioned in 1857, with Southern China coming under a Cantonese-speaking monarchy, and the north remaining under the Qing. They are reunified in the 1930s, and thus would require an official language and lingua franca. China is limited to China proper. Taiwan was successfully colonized by the Dutch.

This new language would ideally combine the phonologies of Mandarin dialects and Cantonese, or a good compromise. I attached an image of an in-progress table of consonants below. Does it look like the phonology of an actual Chinese dialect? What changes would you make? Do you have any recommendations on how to further develop this (including tones, vowels, endings, romanization, etc)?

Thank you!

Answer 1

China is partitioned in 1857, with Southern China coming under a Cantonese-speaking monarchy, and the north remaining under the Qing. They are reunified in the 1930s, and thus would require an official language and lingua franca. China is limited to China proper. Taiwan was successfully colonized by the Dutch

an interesting alternate world 😸

my suggestions:

set the base of this sino-language to 19 initials, and 56 finals, and 9 tones.

if cantonese is more influential, adding a few more, emphasise the entering tone. if mandarin is more influential, subtract all 18 stop coda 😼

to make it more exotic, adding retroflex, according to dutch language 🙀

table of consonants

to persuade others that you’re talking about a sino-language; you need to compose a table of initials (聲母表), a table of finals (韻母表), indicating how many tones used (聲調).

then, compose a table of syllables, something like these:

cantonese syllables

mandarin syllables

have fun :)