Musings (unrelated)

[ilai]

*pokes head out* Haven't posted in a while. Figured that a late night like this would be perfect :) Beware the non-sequiturs....

I always wondered about the tones in Taiwanese/Hokkien...if you look at the regular tones, it seems that they don't seem to follow the classical Chinese tones all that well. But then I realized that you could look at just the sandhi tones, and at least for the yin tones, they do match some historical descriptions (ping becomes mid level, shang becomes high level, qu becomes high falling to low, and ru is short and high).

I like the way tones are kind of preserved in Taiwanese music :)

Still need to finish taxes.... As soon as I double check my state taxes I should be able to make copies and send them off. The Mass DOR Web site was pretty dang slow the other night though; I had to download forms a few times before I actually got them in their entirety. And for some reason I couldn't find the Massachusetts forms at the Central Sq branch library.

When are they ever going to fix that triangular eyesore at Lafayette Square? (The intersection of Main St and Mass Ave does have its own name, but hardly anyone uses it.)

I should clean the kitchen....

Comments

[ilai]

Of all the topics you could've chosen to geek on...

Is that good or bad? :)

Ooooh Schoenhof's! Dang it, I always forget they're closed on Sundays :) They have a textbook there on Hokkien? I should check it out sometime.

Yeah, the problem is that every single tone changes depending on context... I read somewhere that the language is actually unique in that the tone sandhi (what the tones change to) form a cycle. It reminds me of Markov chains (except not....)

[boonleong.livejournal.com]

There's the book only or book and cassettes. Part of me really wants to buy it, and part of me's telling me it's not worth the money.