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As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn
by ghayes 3y ago
As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?
- akavi 3y agoMandarin absolutely does: * 行: xíng or háng * 的: de or dì * 长: cháng or zhǎng (plus I'm sure many more that I can't think of just right now)
- gs17 3y ago了 as le or liǎo, too.
- hangonhn 3y agoDid it get more numerous with the adoption of simplified characters?
- akavi 3y agoI'm not sure, but I believe that most, if not all, mergers from simplification were homophones.
- hawflakes 3y agoYes, it did if you're not a mandarin speaker. The simplification process was biased towards Mandarin and there are some words that were merged that have different pronunciations in Cantonese but not in Mandarin.
- joak 3y agoIn Mandarin there are actually different pronunciation depending on context. Example 觉得 juede, to think 睡觉 shuijiao, to sleep Here the same character is pronounced jue or jiao depending on context
- gnownelag 3y agoBoth Mandarin and Cantonese actually have multiple pronunciations for the same character. Here is an example in both: - 说服/說服 Mandarin: shuì fú Cantonese: seoi3 fuk6 - 说话/說話 Mandarin: shuō huà Cantonese: syut3 waa6
- Umofomia 3y agoMandarin definitely has many characters with multiple pronunciations. One large class come from literary vs. colloquial reading differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readings_of_Chinese_characters#Mandarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readin... Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when used as a noun) or duó (when used as a verb), both of which derived from Old Chinese /daːɡs/ and /daːɡ/, respectively. With Simplified Chinese characters, some of them come from the merger of originally different words that had similar, but not exactly the same pronunciations. For instance, both 髮 (fà) and 發 (fā) were merged into 发.
- ackfoobar 3y agoFor the example you give, in Cantonese they're dou6 and dok6, respectively. The 3/6 tones in Cantonese and ˋ (4th, falling tone) in Mandarin are the "departing" tone, which comes from the departing tone in Middle Chinese, which I believe comes from the -s ending in Old Chinese.
- inkyoto 3y agoBoth do. A single, isolated Chinese character may have multiple unrelated meanings with some of them having an entirely unrelated pronunciation. It is, in fact, ubiquitous. The idea is that each honzi has exactly one meaning is a misconception. With respect to ligatures, if by that you mean the length of the same word across different Sinitic languages, that depends on the specific language and its phonology. Mandarin, for instance, has lost a large number of finals over the course of its evolution which has resulted in words generally being longer and requiring extra syllables to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. The Sinitic languages that have retained more finals (and sounds in general) tend to have more of shorter words. Cantonese is one of them albeit not the only one.