Sun Fin wrote:Interesting! Thanks CaTiRe. I guess that is one of the affects of having a symbol based writing system instead of a letter one. Spellings and pronunciations haven't become corrupted or evolved in quite the same way, as say names from the same period in England!
The characters are pretty much the same and so you can read straight off of an ancient stele, but pronunciations are wildly different - with Cantonese a
tiny bit closer to the Eastern Han spoken Chinese - which, at the time of the Three Kingdoms, is believed to have been mutually intelligible across the entire empire.
For instance, Sun Ce is . . . well, Sun is not actually a good choice because it's pretty similar, but Ce, which is like 'Ts'e' in Mandarin, is like Ts'ag in Cantonese and was something closer to 'Shreg' during the Three Kingdoms. And that's not much of a change.
Even though Cao Cao's surname and given name sound the same today - Ts'ao Ts'ao in Mandarin and Ts'o Ts'o in Cantonese, was something similar to "Zlu Sha-ws."
Then you have some that I can't transliterate from IPA to just English letters, and that make me gag when I try to pronounce them.
Here's a cool video, but in the beginning the speaker has trouble rolling his Rs so he overemphasizes them (there are some comments below). However, as usual, Lady Wu knows way more about this stuff than I ever could! Since she's literally a linguistics expert and all.