Sino-Xenic - Sound Correspondences

Sound Correspondences

Foreign prounciations of these words inevitably only approximated the original Chinese, and many distinctions were lost. In particular Korean and Japanese had far fewer consonants and much simpler syllables than Chinese, and also lacked tones. A further complication is that the various borrowings are based on different local pronunciations at different periods. Nevertheless it is common to treat the pronunciations as developments from the categories of the Middle Chinese rhyme dictionaries.

Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Korean preserve all the distinctions between final nasals and stops, as do southern Chinese varieties such as Yue. In Go-on and Kan-on, the Middle Chinese coda -ng yielded a nasalized vowel, which has become a long vowel in modern Japanese.

As Korean and Japanese lack tones, the borrowings into those languages leave almost no trace of the Middle Chinese tones. Sino-Vietnamese, in contrast, reflects the Chinese tones faithfully, including the Late Middle Chinese split of each tone into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial. The correspondence to the Chinese rising departed tones is reversed from the earlier loans, so that the Vietnamese hỏi and ngã tones reflect the Chinese upper and lower rising tone, while the sắc and nặng tones reflect the upper and lower departing tone. Unlike northern Chinese varieties, Sino-Vietnamese places level-tone words with sonorant initials in the upper level (ngang) category.