Thursday, 25 March 2010

Consonant Please Carol

Part ii of Layman's Linguistics.

Cantonese mong (as in Hong Kong's Mong Kok) becomes wang in Mandarin (Mong Kok = Wang Jiao)

[Cantonese is supposed to be closer to older forms of Chinese.]

I'd always thought this was a strange consonant mutation until the parallel dawned on me:

Old English mid becomes with in Modern English.

While this is presumbably blindingly obvious to anyone who has studied linguistics, I find it quite exciting.

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