A Hainanese mystery
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[This is a guest post from Mok Ling.]
Hainanese is rather atypical of Southern Min (閩南) languages, with lots of innovations and retentions not seen in other varieties in the region: it has, for example, implosive consonants (which it shares with Vietnamese), as well as glottal-final 上聲 (a retention from Old Chinese).
The atypical feature I've found most mysterious is the tendency to pronounce the Middle Chinese 去 tone as 陰平. I haven't managed to find a consistent pattern in the words affected by this tonal shift.
Just for context: I unfortunately do not know which part of the island my grandparents are from. I was told ethnic tensions within the Chinese community in the island of Tanjung Pinang (where they eventually settled) discouraged them from transmitting any kind of information about this to their children. Looking at phonetic data compiled online (from the dialect dictionary kaom.net as well as recordings of Hainanese), it seems that our family lect most resembles Qionghainese (瓊海話).
Here are some examples of the 去-平 change, transcribed from my own speech (these are arranged in no particular order):
話 ("language") ʔiɛ²⁴
畫 ("to draw") iɛ²⁴
花 ("flower") ʔɦiɛ²⁴
號 ("number") ʔɦɔ²⁴
步 ("step") ʔɓɔu²⁴
命 ("life; destiny") mia²⁴
利 ("sharp") lai²⁴
利 (only in 利用) li²⁴
用 ("use", only as a noun) iɔŋ²⁴
二 ("2", as a cardinal and seemingly only word-initially) ʔɗzi²⁴
共 ("and") ka²⁴*
弄 ("to joke") laŋ²⁴
賣 ("to sell") ʔɓɔi²⁴
*As for 共, my mother taught me very carefully to read it as gōng in Mandarin rather than gòng. I thought it had to have been dialectal influence, but 趙元任 Chao Yuen-ren's 1962 article "What is Correct Chinese" shows that I wasn't alone in being taught this antiquated pronunciation.
[end of guest post]
VHM: I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables. This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming two first tones.
Selected readings
- "Tabudish and the origins of Mandarin" (5/21/13)
- "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)
Jerry Packard said,
August 21, 2024 @ 6:58 am
去 tone participated in a derivational relationship with (mostly) 平 tone words in Old Chinese (and earlier), leaving many derivational pairs in modern Mandarin – one of the most obvious being ding4 ding1-zi ‘to nail a nail.’ It could be that the Hainan qu4 forms in question represent groups of words that retained the ‘derived’ form and not the base (or vice-versa).
So, I wonder how the following Mandarin words/morphemes (or their derived/base counterparts) would be pronounced in Hainanese:
cheng4 – scale
chu4 – place
ding4 – to nail
du4 – amount
jiao4 – instruction
liang4 – amount
san4 – scatter
sang4 – lose
zhong4 – grow
Jonathan Smith said,
August 21, 2024 @ 9:35 am
Very interesting! As would be any audio resources Out There that the author is aware of…
This seems to involve historical so-called Tone C2 / Yangqu 陽去 words. FWIW Lin & Chen (1996: 112) 广东闽方言语音研究 describe the same for a few items in their Haikang 海康 (Leizhou): 'road', 'dew', 'tree', 'draw', 'life', etc. They regard such A1/Yinping 阴平 items as "colloquial readings"… whatever the case, nothing about this looks conservative.
Above however is the author suggesting that 'flower' is usually *not* an A1 word in his/her Hainanese? Also, 'and' is probably not relevant… similar items are found across Coastal Min and IDK what relationship there is to other words written "共" or if they matter.
Chris Button said,
August 21, 2024 @ 10:56 am
@ Jerry Packard
I like that proposal. There is similar evidence for it elsewhere in Tibeto-Burman too.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 21, 2024 @ 12:04 pm
No b/c (among other reasons) data named "Leizhou" etc. regularly has Tone 1 corresponding to reflexes of B2 in e.g. "Hokkien" varieties. I guess what looks like a split in some data is to be regarded as stratification…?
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2024 @ 8:24 am
@ Jonathan Smith
I'm not familiar enough with the matter to know what you mean. All I can say is that tonal variation can be influenced by a bunch of phonological factors. But the sporadic alternation with qu-sheng is telling from a typological perspective–whether for dedicated nominalization purposes (so it looks like a language is now using a derived form) or for verbal inflections (that in one language lost the original form or in another lost the inflected form).
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
August 22, 2024 @ 11:47 am
Sorry for the off-topic interruption, but is anybody else having issues with the Zhongwen extension on Firefox? I just notices it's not working here, for me, as of today. And it seems to not be working at a couple of other sites I look at. It appears to be working fine on Chrome for me also. But I don't want to use Chrome.
David Marjanović said,
August 22, 2024 @ 4:43 pm
On the origin of "qusheng derivation".
M. Ling 莫齡 said,
August 23, 2024 @ 3:15 am
@ Jonathan Smith
I just realized my mistake! 花 is obviously 陰平, not 去. Silly me. I must've been thinking of 話, which is a near homonym. I used 共 to spell /ka²⁴/ as a cheeky segue into the note about gòng. As far as I can tell it's not "actually" 共 (that is, 共 is not the 本字).
M. Ling 莫齡 said,
August 23, 2024 @ 3:27 am
@Jerry Packard
I must admit my knowledge of Hainanese is not as complete as I'd like it to be. I will have to ask my other family members to pronounce the whole set. As for the words I do know:
度 /ʔɗɔu²⁴/
教 /ka²²/
量 /niɔ²²/
M. Ling 莫齡 said,
August 23, 2024 @ 3:47 am
@Jonathan Smith
As for 花, I was thinking of 話 but got them mixed up! It's 陰平 in Hainanese as it is everywhere else.
KIRINPUTRA said,
August 23, 2024 @ 4:56 am
Agree that this wouldn't be a conservative phenomenon.
I wonder how else the phenomenon patterns w/i Riau Hainamese, and whether the phenomenon extends to Singapore, Penang, Indochina, & the mother island.
As for 共: I haven't looked at Hainamese for a while, but this looks like a cognate to Hokkien KÃNG / KÃ 共 (Tone 6). It seems to show up on page 1 of de Souza (1903) as KÂNG (Tone A1).
KIRINPUTRA said,
August 23, 2024 @ 5:00 am
@ Mok Ling
Have you gone through "A Manual of the Hailam Colloquial" by de Souza? Does that variety resemble yours?
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
Re: current situation, I know little/nothing either… but a relation to known tonal developments in closely related varieties is I guess to be the default view over (un)conditioned tonal alternation of some kind / tonal split / tonal morpheme / other. To clarify my confused tone numberings above — contemporary Leizhou languages seem often to be described as having "yangshang" categories but with no "yangqu" given merger with "yinping"… meaning "yinping" is now home to colloquial cognates of (e.g.) Hokkien "yangqu" words, including all of the posted list (except 'flower'/'and').
Re: "qusheng derivation," a couple reasons this can't be involved here are (1) the post involves just historical "yangqu" never "yinqu"; (2) even where we see overlap like arguably 'measurement; degree' in "yangqu" from a root 'measure', the putative root is not a "pingsheng" word to begin with (in this case it is a "rusheng" word), giving no way to account for the reported Hainanese result.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2024 @ 1:24 pm
Re: 'and', I guessed that this was related to e.g. Taiwanese kap, kah 'and, etc.' (which depending on factors seems often just to sound high level in casual speech)… but this could be totally wrong; cf. KIRINPUTRA's first comment above.
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2024 @ 4:02 pm
Point 1 sounds compelling enough to me.
Side note regarding point 2. The difference between root final -s and suffixal -s in Old Chinese is often ignored. If it's root final then fine. If it's derivational -s, then it derived from something. But because of point 1, that clearly isn't relevant to the case at hand.
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2024 @ 4:06 pm
And root final -s would be the coda, so you couldn't have anything else between it and the vowel.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 23, 2024 @ 5:10 pm
I don't follow — the point is the (putative) derivations, that is, e.g., -k coda word 'measure' + some suffix ==> the "qu sheng" derivative 'measurement', or -k coda word 'plan' + some (other?) suffix ====> the "qu sheng" derivative 'draw'. There's no basis in such cases for the modern "pingsheng" reflexes above, so in light of Occam + other this is a bad way to try to explain this phenomenon.
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2024 @ 8:41 pm
Just that qu-sheng via suffixal -s (not root final -s) presumably derived from something regardless of whether that form is preserved in whatever language or not. The exceptional qu-sheng could be the manifestation of that and so actually more original depsite appearing to be "exceptional" now. But I'm idly speculating about a language-specific issue I know nothing about based on a comment by someone else! And your point 1 above demonstrates that it couldn't be the case anyway.
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2024 @ 8:44 pm
The exceptional nonqu-sheng, I mean.
(I think I should leave this post now to others actually qualified to comment on it)
Jerry Packard said,
August 24, 2024 @ 7:43 am
@ M. Ling 莫齡
Thanks! So in Mandarin the derivational reflex can be seen in the contrasts (among many) 量 liang2 ‘to measure’ vs liang4 ci2 ‘measure word’ and 教 jiao1 shu1 ‘teach’ vs zong1 jiao4 ‘religion’ or jiao4 shi4 ‘classroom’, or 数 shu3/shu4 ‘measure’. Do these contrasts exist in your dialect?