Four of the nine Cantonese tones map directly to a Mandarin tone. Three of the remaining tones map to two of the Mandarin tones each. Only two of the nine Cantonese tones cannot be predicted. On the other hand, no Mandarin tone maps directly to a Cantonese tone. While a Cantonese ...
I would be surprised if tones in Mandarin and Cantonese that were 入聲 in Middle Chinese would correspond to each other in a straightforward manner. 入聲in Mandarin seems randomly distributed, but homophones in Cantonese usually map to homophones in Mandarin. One could say that 入聲 works only on...
For example, producing the word ‘father’ in Mandarin involves pairing up the segmental string ba with the falling tone [51]: ba51, and the mis-selection of tone produces a completely different word, e.g., ba55‘eight’.1 Despite the prevalence of tone, several empirical and theoretical ...
This can be a little confusing at first, but in essence, if you use written Chinese, you are essentially speaking Mandarin with a Cantonese pronunciation of the characters. So does that mean Cantonese is never actually written down? No, not at all! Spoken Cantonese is commonly used for texti...
The inventory of tones is much larger in Cantonese than in Mandarin, which has 4 lexical tones. In particular, all four Middle Chinese tones have been preserved in Standard Can- tonese, in an upper and lower register, plus the Upper Entering tone (陰入) has been subdivided into two tones...
L&L mention two other differences with Mandarin; however, we believe those are mistaken. They write that, unlike Mandarin, Cantonese does not allow (a) ‘inverted’ resultatives and (b) structures where both Vs are intransitive and the initiator and affectee are distinct (also noted by Chow ...
L&L mention two other differences with Mandarin; however, we believe those are mistaken. They write that, unlike Mandarin, Cantonese does not allow (a) 'inverted' re‑ sultatives and (b) structures where both Vs are intransitive and the initiator and affectee are distinct (also noted by ...