Corrections: "not have" not "have not" and "no surprise" not "know surprise." John On 2/26/06, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Just a follow up on how different Chinese languages can be. Consider > the sentence "Do you have brothers and sisters?" > > In Mandarin that comes out as "Ni you meiyou gegedidijiejiemeiei": > literally "You have [or] have not older brothers (gege), younger > brothers (didi), older sisters (jiejie), younger sisters (meimei)?" > > In Hokkien that comes out as "Li u hia*dijimoai bo?":"You have older > brothers (hia*--with the asterisk indicating nasalization) younger > brothers (di), older sisters (ji), younger sisters (moai) or not?" > > If these were written in Chinese characters "Ni" and "Li," "you" and > "u" would be the same characters. "didijiejiemeimei" would be the same > as "dijimoai" with duplication,e.g., "didi" instead of "di" in > Mandarin. "Gege" and "hia*, "meiyou" and "bo" are different characters > altogether, the latter in each pair being more like classical Chinese. > > Phonetically the two languages sound remarkably different. Once you've > learned both you notice not perfect but close grammatical > similarities. And once you know the characters the fact that "moai", > for instance, is cognate with "mei" comes as know surprise. > > For the sake of simplicity, I have omitted the question of tones. > Mandarin has four (high, rising, broken, falling). Hokkien has seven > divided into two sets (high, mid, low, rising, falling for open > syllables and high and low for closed syllables, i.e., syllables that > end in glottal stops or consonants). > > Cheers, > > John > -- > John McCreery > The Word Works, Ltd. > 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku > Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN > -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd. 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html