| dc.description.abstract | To many Taiwanese, Fujian is a Minnan speaking area. The author has taken a deep probe into the so-called “Minxi” area and found that “Yongding” is a mountain city of Minxi. According to the phonologist in this investigation, Yongding Gaopi is in a mountain terrain and, as a result, its Hakka has preserved more pure ancient tones. However, the field interviews have revealed that there are many words pronounced similarly with the Mandarin tones. This paper is for the study of the Yongding Gaopi Hakka voice tone system and the types of its voice tone evolution, and it is to compare the phonology and vocabulary with other Yongding Hakka (Fengcheng and Yongding dialects, Xiucaiwo in Taiwan).
This paper comes with 6 chapters. The first chapter is exordium, describing the study motives and objectives as well as the literature reviews. The second chapter is about the Yongding Gaopi’s Hakka voice tone system, where the collected information is sorted out into a well organized summary. In Chapter 3, it is a vertical comparison of the Yongding Goapi Hakka, the studied object, with the medieval and ancient Hakka tones. In Chapter 4, the vowel tones, vowel rhymes and voice tones are taken to explore Yongding Goapi Hakka’s tonic features. Chapter 5 gives a comparison among Gaopi Hakka, Yongding Hakka and Taiwan Hakka in order to observe the differences of their vowel tones, vowel rhymes, voice tones and vocabularies. Chapter 6 comes to the conclusions, offering the findings and results, as well as the deficiencies of the study.
The research results reveal the following facts: (1) in the aspect of vowel tones, the “Jing” and “Juian” initialized words have tilde and non-tilde co-exist, indicating that the Goapi Hakka’s tilde is still on the evolvement; (2) about the vowel rhymes, the pronunciation of the “Shieh” and “Niei” ended words is shaped up by going through mouth-open, mouth-close and then vowel pitching; (3) in the auxiliary ending rhymes, the pitch-up rhymes are either gone or transformed into nasalized tones, the heavy rhymes are weakened at word ends. There are two types of end rhyme wakening, making ending rhyme’s unparallel development; (4) about the tones, the full muddy pitch-up sounds have all become high tones and most of the semi-muddy sounds have become low tones, which is quite different from the common features of general Hakka tones; (5) the Yongding Hakka tones on the both sides of the Taiwan Strait have the same root, but have evolved differently.
Keywords: Yongding, Gaopi, Hakka, Voice tone evolution, Vocabulary comparison | en_US |