Pronunciations of Hakka

["Fat" <96981339r@polyu.edu.hk>]

Dear SL,

 

There are some obvious pronunciation deviations from Standard Hakka (Meixianhua) or even Hong Kong Hakka (Same as Shenzhen, Dongguan and Bao'on, but different from Meixian and Taiwan) in the Hakka homepage. I marked them with italics as below:

 

Hakka       Wu-Hu      Cantonese        Mandarin        English 
 song      sang(hsuang)      seung          shuang              pair
 cong       zong/cong          chong          cong               follow
 ngin                                 yen                ren            man/person
 sin                                     sen               shen                body
 sin                                     sen               xin                   new
 wun                                  wen               yun                 cloud
  wun                                 wen              wen                warm

 

1. Cong is only valid for HK Hakka colloquial, in Meixian and HK Hakka literary, it should be a "qiong". It is also misleading to spell Cantonese with 'ch' because it should sound the same as HK Hakka colloquial.

2. Body and new are homophones only in HK and vicinity, they are different in Meixian, Taiwan and most other Hakka speakers. In your spelling system, "new" should be changed to "xin" to mark this difference.

3. Cloud is "yun" (the u here is a [u], not a [y] as in Hanyu Pinyin) which rhymes with "cun", spring. The initial is a [j] instead of a [w].

4. Hakka and even Siyi (Seiyap) has no [w] as in Cantonese and Mandarin. It should be a [v] in place of [w].

5. I suggest the use of "ung" in place of "ong" to represent the rimes of "pair", "follow" etc because this will mislead people to think that it rhymes with English "song", "long". Hanyu Pinyin uses "ong" for "ung" because Mandarin does not have contrast  between"ung", and "ong" . It is better to see than "ung" when one writes fast. But Hakka and Cantonese do have the contrast between "ung" and "ong" e.g. mong for look, tong for sugar, and these are not distinguishable from mung for dream and tung for same.  Even one is not using IPA but only for English-speaking readers, the contrast should be told clearly fropm the spelling.

2. It is easy to spell Hakka because we have only seven vowels (but only six phonemes) in Meixianhua: a, i, u, e, o, schwa and apical vowel. Schwa and apical are complementary to each other and if we use the logic of Hanyu Pinyin, both can be spelled as i togehter with z, c, s; while the cardinal [i] is an i with other consonants. Therefore ji, qi, xi are different from zi, ci, si. That is how I designed my Pinyin system for Hakka ffor computer input. The only disadvantage is that a Hong Kong Hakka speaker must learn Meixianhua to distinguish ji (elder sister) from zi (paper), qim (invade) from cim (deep), or xin (new) from sin (body)  . But you can also see that it is not difficult if one knows some Mandarin: there is a regular correspondence betwen MXH and Mandarin in these sound pairs.

 

Best regards,

 

 Zinfad