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LAURENT SAGART
Kat Hing Wai phonology
With the exception of those words consisting of a nasal consonant and a tone (m1 'five'; ng4 'mistake'), KHW syllables consist of an optional initial consonant, a vowel, an optional final consonant, and a tone. The same syllabic structure is found in SC.
1. Initials, phonological structure.
The initial consonants of KHW are:
P
p'
f
t
ť
1
ty
ty'
k
k'
h
kw
kw'
m
£
l
y
ng
W
These sounds are pronounced as in the MW system, with the following restrictions:
/f/ is often realized as a voiceless bilabial fricative (the initial sound in the Japanese combination hu), when preceding a low vowel: for instance in /faeng4/ 'cooked rice'; /fong2/ 'room'; /fang1/ 'wedding'.
KHW /ty-, ty'-/ differ from the corresponding SC initials /ts-, ts'-/ in that they are always palatalized, whereas SC has palatalized and unpalatalized free variants for these initials. The transcription /ty-, ty’-/ was chosen to underline this phonetic property and suggest that these initials should be regarded as the palatalized counterparts of /t-, t'-/, much as the labiovelars /kw-, kw'-/ are regarded as the labialized counterparts of /k-, k'-/. Thus the phoneme inventory of KHW contains no affricates.
Finally, in Mr. Tang's pronunciation, although perhaps not with other speakers, the initial nasals are occasionally de-nasalized a little before release, giving rise to parasitic stops: m; n; ngô...
Examples of KHW initials are:
/p-/ /p'-/
pi3 p'uy2
'compare' 'accompany'