Quick Guide

Some stuff I've written on things relating to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Icelandic, Mayan

Newer pages are a lot more polished, and over the course of writing these pages, I've had a great deal of help from people interested in languages and linguistics. I thank them all because without their help, a lot of the essentially interesting stuff would not appear here.

The information gathered here is often hard to find in the English language in one place, so I've put some effort into organising the links into some kind of order that will (hopefully) lead one thing onto another.

I hope you enjoy a tour of what I can bring you so it stimulated you to go out and find more information.

Cheers,

Dylan

Friday 10th December 1999.

Since moving over to this new site, I've decided to make more subdirectories to keep track of the things I've been writing, although you won't notice this when you use hyperlinks. The new stuff has been placed outside of the sapienti folder (which contains the old site pretty much as it used to be, except some directories aren't as deeply nested). You can get to the index of each by clicking on the following headings.

• Technical notes of Chinese Phonology
  Chinese has seven main languages, otherwise known as dialects. However, I refer to call these languages, whilst subtypes within each language are a dialect of that language.
  • Mandarin Phonology
  • Wu Phonlogy
  • Yue Phonology
  • Min Phonology
  • Hakka Phonology
  • Gan Phonology
  • Xiang Phonology

• CJKV pertinent topics
  These are encodings, dictionaries and other books which I've used in the course of writing these pages.
  • Encoding used across CJKV countries
  • Korean Jamo

• Chinese - Dialects and Sino-Xenic comparisons
  • Chinese Language
    • This page serves preamble to the subject of the Chinese language and its far reaching influences.
  • Chinese Sounds
    • Modern Chinese sounds are not as they used to be. This is shown by investigating sounds of Chinese preserved in modern day dialects and languages which borrowed sounds from Chinese centuries ago.
  • Chinese Tones
    • Chinese dialects are tonal, meaning that they have distinct variations in pitch for given sounds. We know that the tones of the sounds also change over time, if we compare modern pronunciations with characters listed in the rhyme dictionaries.
  • ShiYun Rhymes
    • The rhymes were used in poetry, and were classed according to sound and tones.
  • Personal experience of Chinese Characters
    • Having no materials to learn one's own dialect of Chinese, Hakka, was a hit and miss affair because where there is lots of stuff on Mandarin and less so in Cantonese, there is virtually none for Hakka.
  • Comparing Hakka and Cantonese
    • There is a question of how related one dialect is to another. On the one hand the amount of shared grammar and vocabulary is a factor. Another is how well sounds map from one dialect to another as shown here.
  • Hakka Japanese - Some coincidences
    • Though Japanese is not a dialect of Chinese, there is some uncanny sound mappings to observe. Because Japanese has borrowed sounds from China for the reading of characters in their own language, they have preserved readings from long ago. But do the similarities between sounds between two unrelated languages point to one be "old" and relatively unchanged, for instance when we consider Hakka and Mandarin?
  • Hakka's relation to Cantonese and Mandarin - unfinished
    • A general overview of sounds between these three Chinese dialects, and some observations about other languages which imported a lot of Chinese vocabulary.
  • Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Numbers - A comparison of sounds
    • Numbers and their readings here are used to demonstrate what we can find out about the changes that modern dialects have been through, when we consider ounds preserved in other languages too.
  • Index to Zhongguo Yuyinxue Yanjiu - from Etudes by Karlgren
    • This book was originally written in French, entitles Études sur la phonologie Chinois, by Bernhard Karlgren, a long time world renowned expert on the Chinese language. My copy is in Chinese and suffers from the lack of an index by which to look up characters with. I've recorded all the 3020+ characters in Big5 form so that they are easy to find using the text-search facility in the browser. The book gives information about the pronunciations of the characters in sino-xenic locales and many dialects of Chinese. Its compilation as a source of pronunciation is important as it was written in a time before Modern Mandarin so its influence can be said to be minimal.

• Specifically Hakka Stuff by me
  • Hakka Homepage
    • My general purpose homepage for Hakka and new stuff. It is the page I usually update when I've something new to put up.
  • Hakka sounds
    • To begin any language you have to know what the sounds in that language are. Since Hakka has many varieties, I've only shown my own here.
  • Hakka Satdiugok Sounds today
    • An inventory of sounds I use daily.
  • Hakka Tones
    • Varying the pitch of a sound gives an added dimension to the meaning of that sound.
  • Hakka Language information
    • On the web, there is perhaps a handful of pages on the Hakka language. I've gathered together some information in this page which may be useful those wanting to find out more about it, plus some of my own ideas about how to represent a sound in Hakka using only characters as a guide - which is also known as "fanqie" a method dating back well over one and a half millenia..
  • Hakka nouns
    • Some vocabulary of plants and animals
  • Hakka numerals
    • How to count using the Chinese number system - in Hakka of course.
  • Hakka pronouns
    • Personal and possesive pronouns heard everyday.
  • Hakka Time Words
    • Days and months
  • Hakka Verbs
    • Perhaps the most important thing in any sentence.
  • Hakka rhymes
    • The rhymes of the sounds in my dialect
  • Hakka Dictionary
    • A Hakka sound - English meaning wordlist. The frames version is much easier to navigate.
  • Correlation between Satdiugok and Pinfa
    • Before I met the Pinfa system that Dr. Lau Chun Fat uses, I invented my own system. I've sometimes used one and then the other, so some explanation is in order to differentiate the two...
  • Hakka poem
    • A poem I first heard my mother say a long time ago, and with help from others, its possible to bring it here for all to read.

• Hakka Stuff by others
  • HagFa Input version 1
    • I think I downloaded this from Dr. Lee SiuLeung's pages at asiawind.com. It has around 6500 characters with repeats
  • Hagfa Input version 2
    • Dr. Lau sent me this in early 1998 and has 8830 entries.
  • Hagfa Input version 3
    • I recieved this from Dr. Lau in January 1999, and he has almost doubled the number of entries compared to the first file.
  • A word from Dr. Lau ChunFat
    • Dr. Lau has given these inputs free for use in the non-commercial community, giving permission for its distribution to all.
  • Hakka Pinfa System - Lau's summary in Big5 Chinese
    • Dr. Lau writes in Chinese about the PinFa system.

• Cantonese (see also "Chinese")
  • Cantonese Tones
    • A nifty way to remember the tones in Cantonese by noting the tones of single digit numerals.

• Chinese - Writing and Lookup Methods
  • How to write and count Chinese character penstrokes
    • If you want to know how to write Chinese characters properly, here is a set of rules or principles used throughout China, Japan and Korea.
  • KangXi Radicals
    • Perhaps the best known of the Chinese dictionaries. The bulk of all modern dictionaries for characters in CJK nations use this as one of their indexing methods. A set of 214 'radicals' are used.
  • KangXi Radicals with variants
    • These 214 radicals do not always appear as you might think. Varients of the characters in the 214 radicals are given here.
  • CangJie / Chongkit
    • For the proficient, it is a very fast method for inputting Chinese characters in a computer document. For the curious, its a neat idea, but hard to master.
  • Chong Kit book (in Chinese)
    • A book on a method for fast input of Chinese characters.
  • Stroke Lookup
    • By far the most widely used system for listing characters. Though not too efficient, it does the job nevertheless.
  • Four Corner Input Method
    • This method I favour after KangXi radicals and then Stroke Lookup. It is relatively easy to understand, as it relies on what appears at the four imaginary corners of a character...

• Icelandic
  • Icelandic Pronunciation guide
    • A lot of the English language has influences stemming from the Viking era. The sounds of Icelandic are found here.

• IPA
  • Phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet
    • Indispensible for linguists, though I don't seem to use it at all in these pages. Then again, I'm not a linguist! This page is not finished. I had intended to have example of the sounds from the languages which I have encountered before, but the sections are still in need of filling in. For a sound, consider the places of articulation, and then the manner of articulation. You should be able to work out the sounds of the consonants eventually. For the vowels, the diagram of vowels is roughly a picture of where the tongue is. By rounding, it means the mouth is roughly circular, and unrounded the lips are not rounded. The vowels really need some sound files to clear up the vagueness...
  • Reworking of this page Sunday 23rd January 2000
    • I wasn't satisfied leaving the above as it was. I recently printed it all out, and it was very long. Originally, I wanted to include examples in ASCII IPA, and tried to create my own, hence the image maps for the vowels and consonants. Now, I've cut that all out, as there are places on the net (see links in this page) which point to a USENET commonly used system by Evan Kirschbaum.

• Japanese
  • Japan and Japanese Language
    • Preamble to Japanese people and their language.
  • Japanese
    • Some things about the Japanese
  • Japanese Writing
    • The writing system of Japanese is quite fascinating, having three orthographic scripts. Its many pronunciation for each kanji is a big hurdle for learners like me. However, I'm more interested about what the sounds and their links to Chinese are than fluent reading of the language...
  • Japanese P sound
    • An interesting thing about Japanese is how it can point to sounds of Chinese at an earlier period by clues fossilised in their language. This is a story about one such.
  • Japanese Orthography 1
    • More about the Japanese derivation of their native syllable representations.
  • Japanese Orthography 2
    • Part 2 of the above goes into modern romanisation of Japanese.

• Maya

  • Maya Counting
    • A one time hobby of mine was calculating Maya dates. Find out how here

• Miscellaneous
  • Chinese Poetry
    • I was translating this a long while ago, then I got caught up in other things. Hopefully I'll finish it in the future. Its maddingly interesting, as it reveals information about aspects of Chinese rigid rime, poetry and prose.