也许你也喜欢吃羊羹嘛？
Sino-Xenic Coda Specimens
are you confused?press for hint
These codas traveled far.
Some survived. Some melted. Some ended up in desserts.
Korean and Cantonese kept the receipts.
Mandarin merged old -m into -n.
Japanese often melted old -ŋ into vowels.
Sweet things remember it all.
A small guide
A coda is the sound at the end of a syllable. For these nasal codas, a useful Middle Chinese sketch is:
Then there is Yōkan.
羊羹 yōkanvegetarian lamb cakea lamb dish from which the lamb has been removed for several centuries
In one major Sino-Japanese route, old -ŋ gradually stopped behaving like a consonant, melting into long vowels. But later borrowing layers can preserve a different flavor. That is exactly why 羊羹 is such a nice specimen. [1]
羊羹 (Yōkan) is not a failed rule, but the cutest reminder that different borrowing layers can send the same old coda toward different endings. 羹 is read かん in this Tō-on layer, while 羊 → よう follows the long-vowel route.
tap for another flavour
one dessert, two routes, and sweet together
Other sweet counterexamples
Then ㅁ walks in.
感 looks perfectly ordinary in Mandarin: gǎn.
But Korean 감 and Cantonese gam² quietly point to an older -m.
Good 音感 helps.
Mandarin merged old -m with -n. Korean and Cantonese kept the nasal codas apart: /m n ŋ/. That makes words like 感 especially nice little fossils. [3]
Why linguists care
Each Sino-Xenic reading is a small slice of Chinese sound history, taken at a different moment of borrowing. Some preserve distinctions that later disappeared in Chinese. Historical phonologists put these slices side by side, trace the differences between them, and reconstruct earlier sound systems. [2]
References
- Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. 2015. “Sino-Japanese Phonology.” In The Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology, edited by Haruo Kubozono, 289–312. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Shen, Zhongwei. 2020. A Phonological History of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Zee, Eric. 1991. “Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese).” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 21 (1): 46–48.
disclaimer: i don't know much about cantonese (yet). comments welcomed!