Nanxiong and Hakka

Laurent Sagart (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

Although Hakka and Nanxiong differ in their mode of devoicing, the dialect of Nanxiong city has a split treatment of the entire zhuoshang category remarkably similar to Hakka in its lexical incidence. This suggests that they share a recent common ancestor, from which the zhuoshang split was inherited. It is argued that the set of zhuoshang words which have tone 1 in standard Hakka and tone 1 or 2 in Nanxiong had tone 4 in the parent language. It is also argued that that this common
ancestor had not yet merged its quanzhuo initials with the voiceless aspirated initials. The ancestral tone 4 then merged with tone 1 in Hakka, and with tone 1 or 2 in Nanxiong; and devoicing occurred separately in Nanxiong and Hakka.

Mots clés: Chinese; dialects; hakka; Nanxiong; historical phonology

Domaines: Linguistique

Laurent Sagart. Nanxiong and Hakka. Fangyan, 2001, 23 (2), pp.142-151. ⟨halshs-00087319⟩