@@jakubolszewski8284If I had to guess, it's because @NUSORCA's comment incidentally implies Chinese to be the villager language. However in Minecraft the villager language is incomprehensible. And thus Chinese being incomprehensible
The sound change is why people no longer use 尔 （爾), because the way people read the character has changed but the way people call others remains to be 'ni', so 你 is created to replace the old 尔. 你 preserves the look of 尔 and uses the sound 'ni'
It's pretty similar to the Japanese pronunciation if we forget how they were simplified. 爾･ni･ji、而･ni･ji、二･ni･ji、牙･ka･ke (Likely from ha･he. And my personal theory is that the K row could be pronounced as X in IPA, which is written as H in Mandarin now, but is still pronounced as X) 儒･jyu、然･dzen･nen、如･jyo･nyo、人･jin･nin、日･Nichi (From Nit)･Jitsu (From Jit). It's very interesting.
@@danielantony1882 牙 is ge・ga. Very easily reconstructed in Middle Chinese as nga (\*ŋa). Every variety other than Mandarin still has the ng- initial consonant
@@danielantony1882 yeah some of Sino-Japanese K-row is h/x (they're different interpretations, same consonant) like 花 \*hua or \*xua as you mention. Some are still K (like 可 \*kʰɑ). Some are obscured in Mandarin because they merged into qi-/ji- (京 \*ki[a]ŋ) or xi- (希 \*hi or \*xi). I started by connecting Japanese and Cantonese first, because Cantonese underwent fewer consonant changes. Eventually connecting Mandarin shows more vowel detail.
Thanks for question. Where Taishanese has ng- [ŋ] and Mandarin has r- (for example, 人, 日, 如), the Middle Chinese sound was *ny- [ɲ], not *ng-. Taishanese does not preserve the Middle Chinese initial unchanged. It has innovated here, merging distinct Middle Chinese sounds *ny- and *ng- to ng-. In other Yue dialects, such as Cantonese, this Middle Chinese *ny- has changed to y- [j-].
@@allabouttaishan3703 Nearly all scholars reconstruct most of these words with *n- in Old Chinese (becoming *ɲ- in Middle Chinese). See for example the reconstructions of Zheng-Zhang Shangfang and Baxter & Sagart for 兒 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%80%8C#Pronunciation and for 人 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA#Pronunciation. A few of these characters are reconstructed by *some* scholars with *ŋ- in Old Chinese, but they all have become *ɲ- (aka 日母) in Middle Chinese.
@@zevhandelUW baxter and Zhengzhang reconstructed 兒 as “ng” I think you’re looking at wrong link that you sent. This is the correct link: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%92 Also 熱 is reconstructed by zhengzhang as “ng” as well. en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/熱 Perhaps Taishanese (which is very similar to Hakka in terms of vowels and choice of words ie 哪 = where, 誰 = Sui, etc) still preserved the initial consonant “ng” from old Chinese while the rest remains Middle Chinese in characteristic. Taishanese, I feel is a possible old Gan dialect that mixed with Cantonese when they migrated into Guangdong, because it’s the most different from all other Yue dialects, I see so much similarity to Hakka and Gan. But I do see a pattern from Xi’an (south central Shaanxi)-> hubei -> Jiangxi -> Guangdong in terms of migration by looking at the dialects of each province, and xi’an dialect (capital of the Tang dynasty) and dungan (Muslim Hui originally from Shaanxi and Gansu) is interesting as well as they also retain the initial consonant “ng” (我 = Nge/Ngai, 硬 = nging) and “h” (鞋 = hai, 下 = ha).
@@allabouttaishan3703 Yes, there are a small number of MC *ɲ- (ny-) words reconstructed in OC with an *ŋ- that palatalized (conditioned by being Type B and having a front vowel) by the time of Middle Chinese. So you can see for example the contrast of 而 (Baxter & Sagart OC *nə > MC nyi) and 兒 (Baxter & Sagart OC *ŋe > MC nye). But there is absolutely no possiblity that these words had anything other than initial *ɲ- (ny-) in Middle Chinese. It's well documented in all the contemporary Middle Chinese sources and supported by developments throughout the Chinese languages as well as borrowings into Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. There can be no doubt that the development of Middle Chinese *ɲ- (ny-) in Hakka and Taishanese is a later development that has nothing to do with the Old Chinese reconstructions. One cannot use the Hakka or Taishanese values to determine which 日母 words of Middle Chinese had an Old Chinese *ŋ- since they have no bearing on the OC pronunciations. There are many Old Chinese and Middle Chinese sounds that have changed into other sounds in Taishanese. That's the way of languages: pronunciations change over time. One can't simply project back from a single dialect.
Why aren't you using IPA btw? Or is the r in transcription of reconstructed forms of Chinese not an alveolar trill, just like it has a special use in transcribing other languages?
I'm following Pulleyblank's notation. He uses mostly standard IPA, but (as is quite common) uses an ordinary letter "r" for the rhotic here just because it's typographically more convenient than ɹ or ɻ .
The Wiktionary entries for Chinese characters now include a lot of this information. You can also take a look at Edwin Pulleyblank's Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation (www.google.com/books/edition/Lexicon_of_Reconstructed_Pronunciation/qWGIxP1R4P4C)
That's a great question. There is an entire field of academic inquiry, Chinese historical phonology, that has developed to recover the pronunciation of words and characters at various times in the past. Different sources of evidence can be used, including contemporaneous texts arranged by pronunciation of characters; rhyming poetry; Chinese words borrowed from or to other languages; and interpolation from pronunciations in modern Chinese dialects (as well as pronunciations of Chinese characters and words in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese). The results are hypothetical; that is, we cannot be 100% sure they are correct in every detail. But there is a high degree of confidence in many aspects of these reconstructed ancient pronunciations.
No, there is no reason to think that language pronunciations overall have been harder or easier at different times. After all, all anatomically modern humans have the same brain structures and the some vocal apparatus. But keep in mind that what feels hard to you depends entirely on your native language. There are no sounds reconstructed for ancient stages of Chinese that are not found in a language spoken somewhere in the world today-and the speakers of those languages experience those sounds as easy to pronounce.
Interesting from a Cantonese (HK / Yuehai) speaker bc 爾 sounds like yee, similar to Middle Chinese but a downward tone. I used to see translations like Peter as 比爾 （Mandarin: bee-er) but Canto was bey-yee so I got confused lol
Hi Zev, I think I asked you this on Twitter before, but none of the OC and MC forms except the very early ones is similar to the general Min Nan rendering of something like /lia/ or /nia/ (generalising the pronunciation here). Is it fair to assume this is just a phonetic borrowing to represent the native word meaning "only"?
Hi! Yes, I do remember you asking that. In a very general sense the answer is yes: 爾 is originally probably a picture of a loom used to write a word for 'loom', so its use to write any other word with a similar sound (including 'you' and 'that') is a phonetic borrowing. There are early attestations of a final OC particle meaning 'only' being written with a variety of characters for their sound value, including 耳, 而. But: I don't know anything specifically about the history of the Hokkien/Minnan /lia~nia/-type word meaning 'that's all; nothing more' or of the history of the use of 爾 to write it. It seems possible to me that the use of 爾 to represent it is old. But it could also be a more recent phonetic borrowing, because 耳而爾二 etc. all have /ni/-like pronunciations in Minnan. I'm just not knowledgeable enough about Min dialect history to venture a more definitive answer, sorry!
Thanks for the question. I don't really have a good source, as I'm not aware of any strong contemporary evidence. (If you know of something, let me know.) Pulleyblank in Middle Chinese (1984:58) speculates that the Late Middle Chinese Rising Tone (shangsheng 上聲) contour shifted from MH (mid-to-high) to MLH (mid-low-high dipping) in the development of Mandarin. His use of tone mark ˇ for shangsheng in his Early Mandarin reconstruction suggests he believed it was dipping already in the 14th century, although I am not aware that he ever made this belief explicit. My reading follows that interpretation of his notation for lack of any better idea.
@@zevhandelUW Makes sense! Tone contour development is a big interest of mine and I'm always looking for more data points. It's very likely that across the spectrum of what was understood as Mandarin throughout history, the tones have always had many different possible interpretations. We know from 19th century data that tones can shift and blend even in the span of 200 years inside the same dialect group.
@@sharuban I think that's exactly right. Tone contours seem to shift more quickly and easily than segmental values, and to show significant variation even across closely related dialects. On the other hand, one occasionally encounters compact dialect groups with a high degree of internal tonal-contour consistency. This seems to be the case for Northern Min, for example. What is special about such groups? What conditions cause that consistency to be maintained over time? These are really interesting questions. One hypothesis that seems intuitively plausible is that the more tones exist in the system, the less room there is for them to move around without merging.
I mean how they evolve.. like slight change on the thing can change meaning of the word, it's not like another languages when even without one syllabe you can guess word.. one slight change in tone can change word. How would that fast that evolve
at what point would other varieties have diverged off Middle Chinese? For example, Wu retains /ȵi/, so it couldn't have descended from later *ʒ̃i Some Yue varieties retain either /ŋi/ or /ȵi/ so the entire branch likely never got to *ʒ̃i
My guess is that most of the differentiation between dialects happened somewhere between Late Middle Chinese (LMC), and Early Mandarin (such as in the "Menggu Ziyun") and other early modern dialects. By that point, LMC had already been differentiated between North dialects and South dialects (which merged the ts tʂ tɕ ʈ series together into ts) for a while - and probably North/South/Cantonese even (Cantonese evades many of the sound changes that were probably well implanted already in LMC such as kæ -> kʲæ)... If you ask me, the rough rhyme inventory of the "last common ancestor" to modern dialects is as follows: ɔ/jɔ/wɔ/ɥɔ, æ/jæ/wæ, u/jy, ɑi/ɔi/æi/jei/wɑi/wɔi/wæi/ɥei, ij/ɥij, ɑu/æu/jeu, ɨu/jɨu/jiu, ɑm/ɔm/æm/jem, im/ɨm, ɑn/æn/jen/wɑn/wæn/ɥen, ɨn/in/un/yn, ɑŋ/jɑŋ/wɑŋ/ɥɑŋ/ɨɑŋ, ɨŋ/iŋ/wɨŋ/yŋ, æŋ/jæŋ/jeŋ/wæŋ/ɥæŋ/ɥeŋ, ɔŋ, uŋ/juŋ
@@boptillyouflopYeah my general understanding is also that the differentiation is around Late Middle Chinese or shortly after, which is why I was confused at the video positing 8th century Middle Chinese of 爾 as *ʒ̃i. Thats too early to have differentiated, and comparative reconstruction implies it should still be a full nasal /ȵi/ at that stage. Though, the kæ > kʲæ (Division II) isn't unique to Cantonese/Yue, Wu also doesn't have it in colloquial readings (c.f. Suzhou 家 /kɑ44/)
As for ȵ~ʒ̃~ɲ~ɲ~ɲʑ~nʒ~nz, it has so many weird reflexes that nothing really surprises me... It was probably always regionally differentiated even in Early Middle Chinese.
@@boptillyouflop It would be nice if the video clarified this. Oftentimes these diachronic showcases seem Mandarin-centric and show changes that haven't occurred in Southern varieties (yet or at all).
@@kori228 Well, ȵ is really particular, and Middle Chinese reconstructions have much worse problems anyways. The fact that you have 4 kinds of finals that all turn into /je/ and are merged in all modern varieties creates massive differences between reconstructions (variously reconstructed as j̠e/j̟e/j̠ʌ/e, e/je/jʌ/ie̯, j̠ɛ/j̟ɛ/jæ/ie̯, iɛ̯/jɛ/iɐ̯/e, ia̯/jia̯/ɨa̯/ɛ, e/je/ø/ɪ, ˠiᴇ/iᴇ/ɨɐ/e, ᵚiɛ/iɛ/iɐ/e, j˞e/je/jæ/ie̯ etc...).
![ประสบการณ์ จ้าง Developer ที่ผมจะไม่มีวันลืม [ภาค1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bzivN4KDg-k/mqdefault.jpg)
The original Minecraft villager found!
Lowkey racist but that's hilarious so I'll let it slide
@@liuzh1han Why racist?
@@jakubolszewski8284 bro is comparing videogame gibberish to a real life language
Wtf do you mean "why racist?" Lol are you fucking braindead
@@jakubolszewski8284If I had to guess, it's because @NUSORCA's comment incidentally implies Chinese to be the villager language. However in Minecraft the villager language is incomprehensible. And thus Chinese being incomprehensible
@@Quidington Hmm, so more xenophobic, or just stereotype hahae.
The sound change is why people no longer use 尔 （爾), because the way people read the character has changed but the way people call others remains to be 'ni', so 你 is created to replace the old 尔. 你 preserves the look of 尔 and uses the sound 'ni'
interesting. thanks
游牧渔猎民族入主中原的后果。他们人数虽少，但是汉人知识分子的数量也少，当与汉人知识分子商讨国家大事时，他们的塞北口音也会由于他们的贵族统治地位而传染给汉人知识分子，结果传授的汉字读音越来越远离古典华夏正音。比如突厥语系词汇就存在高频率的小口型i音，导致很多大口型汉字读音变成了小口型，比如莒在战国本来应该读大口型阿，六本来读陆。但是天高皇帝远的汉族农民却保持了更多的古音交流，结果造成文白分离
@@AofeiZhang皇汉洗洗睡吧
and the original pronunciation of 爾 to mean "you" has been preserved in another word: 你
No that's 儞
@@liuzh1han nope, 儞 is a later creation. 爾 has historically been used for second person.
@@conho4898 no I meant for 你
@@liuzh1han I'm talking about etymology, not glyph origin.
@@conho4898 no I meant 爾 isn't preserved in 你 but in 儞
Can you please do more videos like this? Would love a longer video where you go over more examples like this.
Thanks for your interest. If I have time I may try to do some more of these in the future.
@@zevhandelUW That would be great!
爾 Vietnamese pronounce it as "nhĩ", 而 as "nhi", 二 as "nhị", 弱 as "nhược", 牙 as "nha", 儒 as "nho", 然 as "nhiên", 人 as nhân, 如 as "như", 日 as "nhật".
It's pretty similar to the Japanese pronunciation if we forget how they were simplified.
爾･ni･ji、而･ni･ji、二･ni･ji、牙･ka･ke (Likely from ha･he. And my personal theory is that the K row could be pronounced as X in IPA, which is written as H in Mandarin now, but is still pronounced as X)
儒･jyu、然･dzen･nen、如･jyo･nyo、人･jin･nin、日･Nichi (From Nit)･Jitsu (From Jit).
It's very interesting.
@@danielantony1882 牙 is ge・ga. Very easily reconstructed in Middle Chinese as nga (\*ŋa). Every variety other than Mandarin still has the ng- initial consonant
@@kori228Oh, it's that one? I didn't think it was the ŋ consonant. My apologies. I thought it's the same as 花.
@@danielantony1882 yeah some of Sino-Japanese K-row is h/x (they're different interpretations, same consonant) like 花 \*hua or \*xua as you mention. Some are still K (like 可 \*kʰɑ). Some are obscured in Mandarin because they merged into qi-/ji- (京 \*ki[a]ŋ) or xi- (希 \*hi or \*xi).
I started by connecting Japanese and Cantonese first, because Cantonese underwent fewer consonant changes. Eventually connecting Mandarin shows more vowel detail.
im cantonese and these are fuck similar
ah, this is the evolution of the erhua that i had read about with mandarin
Isn’t it Ngi in Middle Chinese ? For example, in Taishanese, the pattern is all the initial consonant “r” is a “ng” sound.
Thanks for question. Where Taishanese has ng- [ŋ] and Mandarin has r- (for example, 人, 日, 如), the Middle Chinese sound was *ny- [ɲ], not *ng-. Taishanese does not preserve the Middle Chinese initial unchanged. It has innovated here, merging distinct Middle Chinese sounds *ny- and *ng- to ng-. In other Yue dialects, such as Cantonese, this Middle Chinese *ny- has changed to y- [j-].
@@zevhandelUW but in old Chinese, some of the “r” we’re identified as “ng” initial consonant like 熱, 兒, etc
@@allabouttaishan3703 Nearly all scholars reconstruct most of these words with *n- in Old Chinese (becoming *ɲ- in Middle Chinese). See for example the reconstructions of Zheng-Zhang Shangfang and Baxter & Sagart for 兒 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%80%8C#Pronunciation and for 人 here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA#Pronunciation.
A few of these characters are reconstructed by *some* scholars with *ŋ- in Old Chinese, but they all have become *ɲ- (aka 日母) in Middle Chinese.
@@zevhandelUW baxter and Zhengzhang reconstructed 兒 as “ng” I think you’re looking at wrong link that you sent. This is the correct link: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%92
Also 熱 is reconstructed by zhengzhang as “ng” as well. en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/熱
Perhaps Taishanese (which is very similar to Hakka in terms of vowels and choice of words ie 哪 = where, 誰 = Sui, etc) still preserved the initial consonant “ng” from old Chinese while the rest remains Middle Chinese in characteristic.
Taishanese, I feel is a possible old Gan dialect that mixed with Cantonese when they migrated into Guangdong, because it’s the most different from all other Yue dialects, I see so much similarity to Hakka and Gan. But I do see a pattern from Xi’an (south central Shaanxi)-> hubei -> Jiangxi -> Guangdong in terms of migration by looking at the dialects of each province, and xi’an dialect (capital of the Tang dynasty) and dungan (Muslim Hui originally from Shaanxi and Gansu) is interesting as well as they also retain the initial consonant “ng” (我 = Nge/Ngai, 硬 = nging) and “h” (鞋 = hai, 下 = ha).
@@allabouttaishan3703 Yes, there are a small number of MC *ɲ- (ny-) words reconstructed in OC with an *ŋ- that palatalized (conditioned by being Type B and having a front vowel) by the time of Middle Chinese. So you can see for example the contrast of 而 (Baxter & Sagart OC *nə > MC nyi) and 兒 (Baxter & Sagart OC *ŋe > MC nye). But there is absolutely no possiblity that these words had anything other than initial *ɲ- (ny-) in Middle Chinese. It's well documented in all the contemporary Middle Chinese sources and supported by developments throughout the Chinese languages as well as borrowings into Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. There can be no doubt that the development of Middle Chinese *ɲ- (ny-) in Hakka and Taishanese is a later development that has nothing to do with the Old Chinese reconstructions. One cannot use the Hakka or Taishanese values to determine which 日母 words of Middle Chinese had an Old Chinese *ŋ- since they have no bearing on the OC pronunciations.
There are many Old Chinese and Middle Chinese sounds that have changed into other sounds in Taishanese. That's the way of languages: pronunciations change over time. One can't simply project back from a single dialect.
In older Beijing Mandarin the word was pronounced as er but now it has evolved to something like ar
Why aren't you using IPA btw? Or is the r in transcription of reconstructed forms of Chinese not an alveolar trill, just like it has a special use in transcribing other languages?
these were reconstructed when ipa didnt exist
@@neuekatze1theyre saying why arent they using ipa in the video
I'm following Pulleyblank's notation. He uses mostly standard IPA, but (as is quite common) uses an ordinary letter "r" for the rhotic here just because it's typographically more convenient than ɹ or ɻ .
Thanks for the information! Can I know where I can find sources like this?! I need more of these!!
The Wiktionary entries for Chinese characters now include a lot of this information. You can also take a look at Edwin Pulleyblank's Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation (www.google.com/books/edition/Lexicon_of_Reconstructed_Pronunciation/qWGIxP1R4P4C)
@@zevhandelUW Thank you!
how do they know the pronounciation of a hanzi character in a language which didnt have a phonetic alphabet in the past?
That's a great question. There is an entire field of academic inquiry, Chinese historical phonology, that has developed to recover the pronunciation of words and characters at various times in the past. Different sources of evidence can be used, including contemporaneous texts arranged by pronunciation of characters; rhyming poetry; Chinese words borrowed from or to other languages; and interpolation from pronunciations in modern Chinese dialects (as well as pronunciations of Chinese characters and words in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese). The results are hypothetical; that is, we cannot be 100% sure they are correct in every detail. But there is a high degree of confidence in many aspects of these reconstructed ancient pronunciations.
NativLang made a video on this called "What 'Ancient' Chinese sounded like - and how we know".
切韵
@@alexwang982不
?? @@danielantony1882
Japanese:ji
So Ancient Chinese sounded Polynesian Samoan
Monosyllabic Chinese is due to the influence of the Austro-Asiatic language family of Chu State
is it really plausible that ancient peoples tend to have harder pronunciation than the modern one? 😅
No, there is no reason to think that language pronunciations overall have been harder or easier at different times. After all, all anatomically modern humans have the same brain structures and the some vocal apparatus. But keep in mind that what feels hard to you depends entirely on your native language. There are no sounds reconstructed for ancient stages of Chinese that are not found in a language spoken somewhere in the world today-and the speakers of those languages experience those sounds as easy to pronounce.
Interesting from a Cantonese (HK / Yuehai) speaker bc 爾 sounds like yee, similar to Middle Chinese but a downward tone. I used to see translations like Peter as 比爾 （Mandarin: bee-er) but Canto was bey-yee so I got confused lol
That sound more like Bill as in Bill Nye
Hi Zev, I think I asked you this on Twitter before, but none of the OC and MC forms except the very early ones is similar to the general Min Nan rendering of something like /lia/ or /nia/ (generalising the pronunciation here). Is it fair to assume this is just a phonetic borrowing to represent the native word meaning "only"?
Hi! Yes, I do remember you asking that. In a very general sense the answer is yes: 爾 is originally probably a picture of a loom used to write a word for 'loom', so its use to write any other word with a similar sound (including 'you' and 'that') is a phonetic borrowing. There are early attestations of a final OC particle meaning 'only' being written with a variety of characters for their sound value, including 耳, 而.
But: I don't know anything specifically about the history of the Hokkien/Minnan /lia~nia/-type word meaning 'that's all; nothing more' or of the history of the use of 爾 to write it. It seems possible to me that the use of 爾 to represent it is old. But it could also be a more recent phonetic borrowing, because 耳而爾二 etc. all have /ni/-like pronunciations in Minnan.
I'm just not knowledgeable enough about Min dialect history to venture a more definitive answer, sorry!
爾
谢谢您.
What's your source for the dipping tone in 14th century Mandarin?
Thanks for the question. I don't really have a good source, as I'm not aware of any strong contemporary evidence. (If you know of something, let me know.)
Pulleyblank in Middle Chinese (1984:58) speculates that the Late Middle Chinese Rising Tone (shangsheng 上聲) contour shifted from MH (mid-to-high) to MLH (mid-low-high dipping) in the development of Mandarin. His use of tone mark ˇ for shangsheng in his Early Mandarin reconstruction suggests he believed it was dipping already in the 14th century, although I am not aware that he ever made this belief explicit.
My reading follows that interpretation of his notation for lack of any better idea.
@@zevhandelUW Makes sense! Tone contour development is a big interest of mine and I'm always looking for more data points. It's very likely that across the spectrum of what was understood as Mandarin throughout history, the tones have always had many different possible interpretations. We know from 19th century data that tones can shift and blend even in the span of 200 years inside the same dialect group.
@@sharuban I think that's exactly right. Tone contours seem to shift more quickly and easily than segmental values, and to show significant variation even across closely related dialects.
On the other hand, one occasionally encounters compact dialect groups with a high degree of internal tonal-contour consistency. This seems to be the case for Northern Min, for example. What is special about such groups? What conditions cause that consistency to be maintained over time? These are really interesting questions. One hypothesis that seems intuitively plausible is that the more tones exist in the system, the less room there is for them to move around without merging.
Cantonese is pronounced “yi”
Almost the same one 😂
I mean how they evolve.. like slight change on the thing can change meaning of the word, it's not like another languages when even without one syllabe you can guess word.. one slight change in tone can change word. How would that fast that evolve
It's like how people now regularly say "gonna". I bet your great grandfather doesn't use that word.
Wtf
i gag at the sight of nasaled consanents
why does it even change? just speak normally gosh
wow how stupid
consonants and vowel shifts
Why do you speak differently to someone born 300 years ago?
@@neicu34 its my fault people changed the way they talk in 300 years? like bro there is zero point in your comment
@@唯我独尊ー obviously you missed the point
at what point would other varieties have diverged off Middle Chinese? For example, Wu retains /ȵi/, so it couldn't have descended from later *ʒ̃i
Some Yue varieties retain either /ŋi/ or /ȵi/ so the entire branch likely never got to *ʒ̃i
My guess is that most of the differentiation between dialects happened somewhere between Late Middle Chinese (LMC), and Early Mandarin (such as in the "Menggu Ziyun") and other early modern dialects. By that point, LMC had already been differentiated between North dialects and South dialects (which merged the ts tʂ tɕ ʈ series together into ts) for a while - and probably North/South/Cantonese even (Cantonese evades many of the sound changes that were probably well implanted already in LMC such as kæ -> kʲæ)...
If you ask me, the rough rhyme inventory of the "last common ancestor" to modern dialects is as follows:
ɔ/jɔ/wɔ/ɥɔ, æ/jæ/wæ, u/jy, ɑi/ɔi/æi/jei/wɑi/wɔi/wæi/ɥei, ij/ɥij, ɑu/æu/jeu, ɨu/jɨu/jiu, ɑm/ɔm/æm/jem, im/ɨm, ɑn/æn/jen/wɑn/wæn/ɥen, ɨn/in/un/yn, ɑŋ/jɑŋ/wɑŋ/ɥɑŋ/ɨɑŋ, ɨŋ/iŋ/wɨŋ/yŋ, æŋ/jæŋ/jeŋ/wæŋ/ɥæŋ/ɥeŋ, ɔŋ, uŋ/juŋ
@@boptillyouflopYeah my general understanding is also that the differentiation is around Late Middle Chinese or shortly after, which is why I was confused at the video positing 8th century Middle Chinese of 爾 as *ʒ̃i. Thats too early to have differentiated, and comparative reconstruction implies it should still be a full nasal /ȵi/ at that stage.
Though, the kæ > kʲæ (Division II) isn't unique to Cantonese/Yue, Wu also doesn't have it in colloquial readings (c.f. Suzhou 家 /kɑ44/)
As for ȵ~ʒ̃~ɲ~ɲ~ɲʑ~nʒ~nz, it has so many weird reflexes that nothing really surprises me... It was probably always regionally differentiated even in Early Middle Chinese.
@@boptillyouflop It would be nice if the video clarified this. Oftentimes these diachronic showcases seem Mandarin-centric and show changes that haven't occurred in Southern varieties (yet or at all).
@@kori228 Well, ȵ is really particular, and Middle Chinese reconstructions have much worse problems anyways. The fact that you have 4 kinds of finals that all turn into /je/ and are merged in all modern varieties creates massive differences between reconstructions (variously reconstructed as j̠e/j̟e/j̠ʌ/e, e/je/jʌ/ie̯, j̠ɛ/j̟ɛ/jæ/ie̯, iɛ̯/jɛ/iɐ̯/e, ia̯/jia̯/ɨa̯/ɛ, e/je/ø/ɪ, ˠiᴇ/iᴇ/ɨɐ/e, ᵚiɛ/iɛ/iɐ/e, j˞e/je/jæ/ie̯ etc...).