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Thread: Chinese Ancient Poems

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[quote=CHRISWAUGHBJ,37467]Alright, May, I have an email from an expert friend (honestly, this guy's knowledge of Chinese language is simply amazing!) and I'll put two short quotations here:
"The answer (if it's not too difficult for us foreigners to understand) is that Mandarin has had a lot of radical changes happen to it since it first broke off from Middle Chinese, whereas Cantonese has been much more conservative. Middle Chinese had four tonal categories (level, rising, departing, entering), one of which - the entering tone (入声) - had a final obstruent consonant, which Cantonese has preserved. Cantonese doesn't sound exactly the same, of course; beyond the sound shifts that happen naturally, there was also a tone split some time around the late Tang/early Song (if I recall correctly -- am going from dim memory here) that broke the set of four tones into eight tones in two pitch registers."
"Broadly speaking, Cantonese has done a better job of preserving these tonal categories than Mandarin has."
So I guess we're both right and both wrong.[/quote]

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