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Ugh the first paragraph kicks off with a missing bit of information. Min Nan has at least 5 subvarieties. In my spouse's it's pronounced "de" not "te" (and she

Ugh the first paragraph kicks off with a missing bit of information. Min Nan has at least 5 subvarieties. In my spouse's it's pronounced "de" not "te" (and she is Min Nan as a first language). She laughed and said there's no way the people in Xiamen said "te", or any of the subvarieties she is familiar with within coastal fujian where she spent the first 25 years of her life. So failed look at archaic miss transliterations, kind of reminiscent of the entire theme of the article. The example map being built on an argument from a bad assumption (a historical error as a pretext for argument). Perfect irony.

CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
de/te as in English or de/te as in pinyin? She and the article could well be both right if she's talking about pinyin pronunciation and the article not.
bivargen 3y ago
While I do not doubt that your spouse, this is besides the point, the point is that Min Nan pronounces the first phoneme of the word for “tea” with a dental stop, other chinese variants/languages realize the same phoneme with a dental affricate. I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.
tdtd 3y ago
The "te" transliteration for 茶 in Min Nan comes from the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB), which doesn't use the letter 'd' at all. As was common for Chinese romanization systems from before the 20th century, it used 't' for unaspirated /t/ (which we would use use 'd' for today in systems like Pinyin for Mandarin or Peng'im for Teochew), and used 'th' for aspirated /tʰ/ (which we sould use 't' for today in systems like Pinyin or Peng'im). This isn't an archaic miss transliteration, it's just an alternative transliteration strategy. In many languages that primarily use the latin alphabet, the phonemes associated with 't' and 'd' are /t/ and /d/, primarily distinguished by voice instead of aspiration (where aspiration is allophonic), so it's logical that the creators of earlier romanization systems focused on preserving that voice distinction, even if it's less common today for a variety of reasons.

CorrectHorseBat 3y ago

de/te as in English or de/te as in pinyin? She and the article could well be both right if she's talking about pinyin pronunciation and the article not.

bivargen 3y ago

While I do not doubt that your spouse, this is besides the point, the point is that Min Nan pronounces the first phoneme of the word for “tea” with a dental stop, other chinese variants/languages realize the same phoneme with a dental affricate. I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.

tdtd 3y ago

The "te" transliteration for 茶 in Min Nan comes from the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB), which doesn't use the letter 'd' at all. As was common for Chinese romanization systems from before the 20th century, it used 't' for unaspirated /t/ (which we would use use 'd' for today in systems like Pinyin for Mandarin or Peng'im for Teochew), and used 'th' for aspirated /tʰ/ (which we sould use 't' for today in systems like Pinyin or Peng'im). This isn't an archaic miss transliteration, it's just an alternative transliteration strategy. In many languages that primarily use the latin alphabet, the phonemes associated with 't' and 'd' are /t/ and /d/, primarily distinguished by voice instead of aspiration (where aspiration is allophonic), so it's logical that the creators of earlier romanization systems focused on preserving that voice distinction, even if it's less common today for a variety of reasons.