Southern Min: Comparative Phonology and Subgrouping

ISBN-13: 9781138943650 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 218 str.

Bit Chee Kwok

Opis

About 47 million people in Southeast China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia speak Southern Min, a major Chinese dialect group. Yet, Southern Min itself is linguistically diversified. How did Southern Min evolve into its present forms? What is the relationship between different members in this dialect group? Southern Min: Comparative Phonology and Subgrouping attempts to provide answers to these questions from a phylogenetic perspective. Using largely first-hand data, the author offers the first phonological reconstruction of Proto-Southern-Min from which all modern dialects are assumed to have derived. A major contribution of this book is the generation of a panoramic view of the structure of the Southern Min family. This book advances our knowledge of not only the linguistic importance of Southern Min, but also the methodology of Chinese dialect classification. This book will be an important reference for people interested in Chinese dialectology and historical linguistics.

Recenzje

"Hokkien Southern Min preserves time-honored phonological features that have been long lost in modern Mandarin Chinese. In this condense yet in-depth book Dr. Kwock provides us with a comprehensive treatment of how Southern Min evolves from its earlier stages to present diversified subdialects based on the fresh first-hand fieldwork and the historical comparative method. Many intriguing theoretical issues in particular dialectal subgroup have been cogently presented and tackled with author’s expert knowledge of a variety of Southern Min in their constant drift." - Lien Chinfa, Professor, Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University

Spis treści

1. Background and Methodology  2. Proto-Southern Mǐn initials  3. Proto-Southern Mǐn finals  4. Proto-Southern Mǐn tonal categories  5. Subgrouping Southern Mǐn  6. Conclusion

O autorze

Bit-Chee Kwok is currently Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie primarily in historical linguistics, contact linguistics and Chinese dialectology.