Comparative Study on Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin
I. The Checked Tone feature of ancient Chinese pronunciation Chinese character pronunciations in Korean, Japanese, and Cantonese retain some important features of ancient Chinese that are lost in Mandarin. One of these features is the Checked Tone ( 入聲 ). For example, the pronunciations of Chinese character ‘ 目 ’ in different languages are : Chinese character Cantonese Korean Japanese Mandarin 目 mok mok moku mu ‘ 目 ’ is pronounced ‘mok’ in both Cantonese and Korean. The ending ‘k’ in ‘mok’ is called a Checked Tone or an Entering Tone ( 入聲 ), which is an important feature of ancient Chinese. The Japanese pronunciation of ‘ 目 ’ is ‘moku’. The second syllable ‘ku’ is a simulation of the Checked Tone ‘k’. Why ‘k’ becomes ‘ku’ in Japanese ? Because Japanese uses Kana ( 仮名 )s to simulate foreign language pronunciations. A Kana is either a vowel or a consonant+vowel combination. ( The only one exception is ‘ ん ’ / ‘ ン ’ pronounced ‘n’. ) There is no Kana for a single consonant ‘k’, so t