54
J. MCCOY
The aspirated stops are analyzed as unit phonemes simply to maintain the pattern of single consonant initials; all other arguments seem equally strong for interpreting them either as units or clusters.
Two special points should be noted about the distribution of the consonants. Unlike SC, KS /m,p/ do not appear finally in a syllable but are replaced with /n, t/ respectively. Thus we find KS /sen1/ 'heart' and /it2/ 'leaf' as compared with SC /sêm1/ and /ip6/, with the SC tone contours here the same as the KS counterparts. The possible final consonants in KS then are /n, ng, t, k/.
Again unlike SC, KS /n/ does not occur initially and /ng/ occurs initially only before zero final. Initial /n/ has merged with /l/ giving /lui6/ 'female' and /lan2/ 'male'. We find /ng5/ 'five', but all other categories of words which may have initial /ng/ in other Kwangtung Province dialects have a vowel initial in KS, e.g., /ui5/ 'outside', /ngo5/ 'hungry', and /jit2/ 'hot'.
It should be noted that KS has no labialvelar consonant phonemes of the type /kw, kwh/ as postulated for SC by many analysts. There are no KS contrasts of the type which might suggest such a phoneme; thus we have KS /kong3/ 'to speak' and /kwong1/ 'bright', /kok3/ 'each, every' and /kwok3/ 'nation'. The point might well be made here that even in SC the phoneme /kw/ is not strictly required by the phonological evidence since there are no contrasts /k/ versus /kw/ which cannot be just as easily handled by /k/ plus /u/ with a saving in the phoneme inventory.
The KS vowel system is:
Front
i
Central
Back
u
The vowels require more detailed explanation since, unlike the KS consonants, they are not similar enough to SC to permit descriptions of that dialect to suffice.