I find it strange that hakka, cantonese, min languages have the sound "Ng" to mean Not.

It seems that the original chinese languages have the sound 'Ng' and not � which is a mandarin invention (I think).

In cantonese, the character is å””. But this is a modern invention.

Does anybody know the original chinese character ?

Actually, it was not "ng" (as 吳/吾) but rather "m". But many modern dialects now confuse them (usually in the direction of ng->m).
The ng-m difference is also recorded in http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/

I think 不 has been used from ancient times.
e.g. "時不我待" ("Time does not await us", notice the grammatical difference..)

I think this is "unintentional 假借". The character existed but might not be commonly known; it's meaning is like "to put in mouth", and this original usage sounds like 'ng' in Cantonese and Hakka, but not Min.
In Fuzhounese, "伓" is used instead, and it sounds 'ng. But I would guess this was 'm as well, as Fuzhounese confuse all nasal endings (-m and -n becomes -ng)

Is there any usage in Minnan besides questions and putting before 是?
If I'm not wrong the negative is 'bo' 毋 for in Minnan (but we know this b- came from m-).
It sounds 'mou' in Cantonese and 'wu' in Mandarin, so I would guess that in Cantonese it was like 'mu' before (partial) u->ou and i->ei change.
So I guess it came from 毋 with the -u dropped a long time ago when used before another word.

It is used in the same place as cantonese, another example

唔免 - no need.

Bo should be 無.

Mou, Tou, Sou in cantonese map to Mo, To, So in minnan.
Cantonese m consonant sometimes map to b consonant in minnan instead of m.


This character is new to me 毋. Where can I check the sound ?

what does 唔免 mean? this phrase is new to me. can you use it in a sentence?



毋 as in 毋須.

But 毋 has the same sound as Mou. So this is not the right character.


唔� is unique to the min language. It equivalent to 唔使 in cantonese.

Eg.

你 唔 � 來 (you don't have to come)

i m not sure if å”” is ever affixed to å…�.... (i do recall mildly that some people do use it)

however the usual way (probably casual) way will just say 'bien' å…�

(you don't have to come) will roughly translate to ��來

å”” is not required

Well, m and b are "conditional" in Minnan (except maybe in overseas where there is strong influences from other languages). The condition is, if the vowel is nasalized then the consonant is m, b otherwise.
I don't know if it's similar to 'mb' in Jin.

I won't say e.g. 來 is incorrect for 'to come' in Cantonese because it sounds 'loi' instead of 'lai'.

Actually what sound do you expect for the "correct character"? "m"?
But this sound won't be achieved by regular patterns from Middle Chinese to Old Cantonese.

"Ng" is not the correct sound for "not" in older versions of Cantonese (before the lazy sounds); the correct sound is "m". Pronouncing it as "ng" will be an overcorrection, i.e .reversing the patterns of "lazy sounds". 愛 oi3 is correct while ngoi3 is nonstandard.

edit:
If you say the ms are different because the m in 毋 begins the word whereas the 'm (not) ends the word, I will say that this change is possible. 毋 sounded like 'mu' before the diphthongization.
Look at the Mandarin 'er'. It corresponds to Sino-Vietnamese 'nhi', while usually nh- in Vietnamese corresponds to r- as initial in Mandarin (we know 'i' is dropped after retroflex).

And I doubt if it's double negative combined together to give a negative result...
It might also be a "doubling" of the initial consonant of "免".

唔� is a bad example. 唔愛 is a better example.

來 Lei, lai and loi differs only in the vowel. And the vowel are close enough to be variants of each other.
Some dialects of cantonese use one version or another. I think Toi San cantonese use Loi while some version of cantonese use lei.
Lai seems to be a hong kong transformation ?

Whereas the sounds of mou and ng is too different.
Ng and m are similar in sound and can be variants of each other, some people do get confused.
M -> Ng is possible but not Mou -> M

So the mystery character is still waiting to be found.

Won't "boai" (毋愛) also used in this case?
Or does it depend on which variety of MinNan?
Nowadays Hong Kong people use "Lei" very often too.
"Lai" is recorded at least since 19th century AD. A character for this was made (嚟, obviously representing "Lai") but I don't think any was made specifically for this "Lei".

I said it was never pronounced as ng except in hypercorrection.
Example of hypercorrection in Cantonese are 愛 read as "ngoi3" and 藍 written as "Nam".
If some "lazy pattern" happened, it does not mean reversing the pattern completely will give the standard sounds.
The standard versions are 愛 = oi3 and 藍 = Lam (laam4), though many Hong Kongers either don't know or don't care about this.

See the "粵語韻母表" part of http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/
You will see that m and ng are separate. The site also do not consider 吳, 吾 as 'm'.
The correct sound for 唔 ("not") is "m4"; "ng4" is considered 異讀.
Of course, it ignores the previous meaning of "to put in mouth" as it's very uncommon.

So let me emphasize again that it's nonstandard to pronounce 唔("not") as "ng".
In this case, 'm' is correct sound for 唔(not). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._L._Wong_(p...ymbols)#Summary

This 'm' is actually quite special, as only one meaningful word really had that sound (e.g. the change of 'ng' like 吳 to 'm' has not happened). The others that end with -m are really just interjections.

Then I see that you are also confused.
Hong Kongers sometimes will use "ng" to represent this sound just because they confuse it with the sound of 吳 (written "Ng").

My theory is that
mu (毋)-> m (yes, mu not mou as I assume it's quite old, before e.g. 蘇 merged with 騷)
and long after that
ng (吳) -> m (rather new new confusion)

yes 'bo ai' used also, 'm ai' is normally combined to become 'mai' to mean 'don't want'

'bo ai' will normally mean 'dun love', but can also mean 'dun want'

Consider the famous hokkien song. A double negation ?


一時失志,唔�怨嘆
一時�魄,唔�膽寒
那通失去希望,�日醉茫茫
無魂有體,親�著�人

人生�比是海上波浪
有時起,有時�
好�歹�,總嘛愛照起工來行
三分天注定,七分��拼
愛拼�會�

Btw, one example of double negative found in official Chinese is 禁止.
禁止(something) can be interpreted as 禁(something)+止(something)...
But is this word an influence of Japanese?

So which of oi3 and ngoi3 are irregular?

Some say that Cantonese 'lai' is the avoidance of the a -> o shift. Also for the word 'voucher' wouldn't 'lai kyun' be more orignal than 'lai hyun' which is the 'standard'?

mu -> m is still too different to be acceptable. Do you have any internet link on this ?

There are some cantonese words that different between ngoi and oi.

Generally, the mandarin W consonant maps to Ng and the A consonant maps to O.

Eg.

Wai (external) -> Ngoi
Ai (love) -> Oi

But hong kongers don't distinguish them.

Minnan still distinguish the mapping

Wai -> Gua (G consonant)
Ai -> Ai (A consonant)

actually, 唔免 (or 呣免 or 毋免) is very common usage in Taiwan Holo.

The term 毋免 often is used as "Don't need to".

external is supposed to be 'ngai' in middle Chinese (ngoi in cantonese and wai in mandarin). all middle chinese descended languages (hakka, cantonese, mandarin) have the vowel shifts a -> o -> u. Cantonese and Hakka tend to have more a -> o than Mandarin. But o -> u is more severe in Mandarin (especially after dropping of consonants)

What do you mean HKers dont distinguish them....? you mean ai and oi? Cantonese distinguishes between the most dipthongs in Chinese ei, ai, oi, ui, iu, eu, eui, ou, ao

I found yet another word like that... 除非.



Mandarin's (non-Rusheng) ri->er is just as different as this.
(here I am assuming that r has not turned into rolled z)

And I suppose the mu is never used "alone" and omitting finals on the "connected form" is quite common in Cantonese fast speech
e.g. 49 *fast: sei sap gau -> sei a gau. (the p is gone)
so I am conjecturing e.g. muchi (not know)-> m-tsi

And I know that there is glottal stop sound preceding the 'm' but it also presents before the 'er'. And it could be added later after the dropping of the vowel.

I don't know if anybody else has proposed this so I'm not sure if there's any.
In fact many people thinks that this word came from Baiyue.

The tone is different, so it is not a minimal pair in this case.

Hong Kongers distinguish them by the tone. 3rd and 6th tone are similar for many people, but still distinguishable as I observed.

It's 'oi' too in Sino-Korean, while 'to love' = 'ai' (commonly written as 'ae').
This is made clear by the Sino-Vietnamese reading of ngoại.
Cantonese simply don't have 'ngw' initial (w is only allowed without anything preceding it or in kw, kw').
In the forbidden cases, people just changed either the initial (e.g. h to f/w) or the final (e.g. wai -> eui)

A is not consonant, but people regularly add a consonant in front of it. The so-called "zero initial" is very often pronounced as glottal stop.
@xng: in case you are still confused, "glottal stop" is a consonant, not a category of consonants ("stop"/"plosive", includes p/t/k and this "glottal stop")

Except in "冇" (<"無"), I don't see how Hakka is less severe change than Mandarin.
And Cantonese changed u "back" to ou under some initial consonants (I think it's preserved only under w, k, k'w and f).
(The diphthongization, e.g. the well-known changes i (->"iy") -> ei and ü (->"üy") -> öy )

I mean oi and ngoi.

I mean hong kongers either pronounce all words as 'without' ng or 'with' ng consonant.
It should be a case of mixture of ng and non-ng.

Eg.
愛 should be Oi ( I hear cantonese songs pronouncing as Ngoi)
外 should be Ngoi (instead of Oi)
我 should be Ngo (Instead of O)
危 should be Ngai (Instead of Ai)
暗 should be Am (cantonese songs pronounce as Ngam)

The only way to confirm that whether this is baiyue is to look at the vietnamese language.
Does vietnamese has "m" to mean Not ?

If vietnamese doesn't have the same sound and same meaning, then it is chinese in origin since it is common to min, hakka and cantonese.

Does the taiwanese government use 毋 (as suggested by qrasy) ?

If this is the case, then this should be the right character.

Why is there another character 呣 since there is already a 毋?

I don't know why cantonese use 唔 instead of 毋 which should be the original character.

It's really difficult to find a minimal pair between ng- and "zero initial" in Standard Cantonese, as Middle Chinese' ng- (疑系) tends to go to Cantonese' low category whereas the glottal stop (影系) tends to go to high category.
喻系 (something like "zero initial") tends to go to low category but it becomes y and w instead.

As far as I know, the only way it can happen is when the tone is changed or when the initial consonant changed from k/k'/h to ng-, e.g. 鈎 vs 歐.
鈎 is ngau1 not au1 (lazy sound) or gau1 (guessed sound from usual pattern)

You can also see Zhuang, Tai, etc.
Vietnamese does not have standalone nasal consonant as a word. There's no letters like "m" or "n" with tone marks in Quoc Ngu writing.

Most, if not all, of the meaningful vowel-less words in Chinese dialects came from words whose vowel was gone (i.e., the word should have had a vowel before some change of sounds happened)
For example, Meixian(?) Hakka 你 'n' (it's "ni" in many other dialects).
and Cantonese 'ng' would be 'ngu' if the rhyme followed the trend, i.e. 午 should rhyme with 苦, 古, etc.
"Mu" is closer to "m" than e.g. "ma", "mi" so it's a reasonable guess.

Minnan is immune to o->u change (or does it reverse the change?), but I think it's still possible.

edit: somehow this reminds me of one occasion where one of my friends from Mainland wrote down "母鸡" to represent "don't know"
Why does Cantonese use 嚟 instead of obviously correct 來? (this is because the sound is obviously different)
Why is 錫 used for something like 'to love' instead of 惜 (~愛惜)? In this case it's even worse if you try to write with "the correct word", as people may misinterpret it since 惜(literary) is homophonous with "識" (to know, to recognize) after sh merged with s, which will not happen for 錫. I can't imagine how modern Cantonese people will react to "我好惜佢" or "我好惜其".

edit:
其 and 來 themselves are 假借, but we can say that they are "correct" if we don't go earlier than Middle Chinese.
Sometimes I even see 泥/尼 for lai/lei used by Hong Kong people, which obviously is only possible when n/l are confused.
But I think the sound of "離" is more correct than 尼 On one occasion I wrote down "你幾時離啊".

Each chinese character can have more than one sound depending on meaning and context.

The Cantonese word for oi(love),toiwan(Taiwan) and loi(come) contains "oi"..but where in mandarin they are replaced with "ai" which gives you ai, taiwan, and lai. In Japanese and in hokkien Taiwanese they use the "ai" ie Japanese say ai for love and kai for sea and taiwanese say "daiwan" for Taiwan. So does this means the usage of "ai" instead of "oi" was from Middle Chinese. Or both were used??

Could the chinese who were sent to Japan by the Qin emperor..be the people from Fujian? cuz there are some words that are similar in both languages for example Go = 五 and Dai = 台

This is why there are so many lazy sounds in HK Cantonese because there is no need for ng- when most the words are already distinguished by tone. When Middle Chinese lost voiced consonants it splited all its tones giving 8 tones. All the ng- (voiced) would be in different tone to glottal stop (unvoiced). Cantonese preserved all 8 tones plus split another tone so HK people simply merge ng- to glottal stop since the meaning of the words would still be distinguished as they are in different tone. This allows for HK speakers to have lazy sounds as they can be lazy but still understood. On the other hand, other 'middle chinese descended languages' such as Hakka and Zhongshan Cantonese has merged to 6 tones so then it puts more emphasise on initials, while Mandarin has completely lost ng-.

But then, that one is not commonly known, and can cause much inconvenience.

It will be annoying if words with different sounds that can be used in the same place (e.g. they are in the same type) are written the same.
And we also can see the trend in classical Chinese to reverse confusion caused by 假借 (even though different things), e.g. 雲 vs 云.

If we can replace those 口-things in Cantonese with a "correct" character that may not mean people will understand it..
Oh, btw, he usage of "呣" also suggested that it's "m" not "ng".

What became "aai" and "oi" rhymes in Cantonese usually corresponds to Mandarin/Sino-Xenic "ai". But then if we see rhyme books it can be shown that they were different, but perhaps similar rhymes.
Maybe as similar as [æ] and [ɑ]. In Modern translation from English, Japanese will change both to /a/.

Similar sounds mean more like that it fits the modern phonology best or they simply followed the same changes.
Japanese phonology is very simple, therefore we can't judge well as we lost a lot of distinction.

As far as I know, among Chinese only Minnan is almost totally "immune" to o>u change and also changes ng->g in many cases. Yes, Minnan as in Xiamen not Mindong as in Fuzhounese where o->u->ü is (larger shift) is common.

And actually the initial of 台 is not /d/ in Fujianese, but /t/, same as the initial of Cantonese 多.

I'm thinking that it lost the distinction after the tone split, because some Wu dialects had both Yin-Yang difference and voiced initial consonants, though maybe, finding e.g. Yin tone + voiced initial combination would be very difficult.
But then, it will give chance to the development of lazy Wu dialects that do not have voiced initials under strong influence of Mandarin... (and actually I already found some)

Even if confusion occurs, most of the time context still distinguishes them. N and L has considerable amount of minimal pairs in Cantonese, but even after they are merged no significant confusion occur.

Well, people may make fun if the sentence itself can't really completely rule out the chance of other meanings, e.g. if a person pronounce 擦 as 拆, then 我要擦黑板.

Then this argument is somehow self-contradictory because Mandarin even has less tones and do not put more emphasis on the initials.

So the replacement of ng- with glottal stop actually increases more syllables, but this 'cancels out' with the lost ng- syllables. BTW was there a distinction with the 'aspirated' ng- (which has a 'g-' sound after the nasalisation) and the 'unaspirated' ng- (which is only nasalisation at the begining.)

I don't know how the replacement can increase the number of syllables. It's just a replacement, of course no syllable change if there's no new confusion.

If there's such thing then it should be earlier Middle Chinese.
"Ngg" is not the same as "aspirated ng". Some words like 魚 and 耳 starts with h- in Minnan which will be "irregular" if we go with Middle Chinese. So "aspirated nasals" were reconstructed for Old Chinese.

I just found out that the cantonese sound for 呣 is 'm'

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/

So this confirms that the character for 'm' (meaning not) is actually 毋 and not 唔 for min, cantonese, hakka since the radical for mouth 呣 indicates the sound for the character.

In cantonese, 毋 must have undergone a sound change from 'm' to 'mou'.
That's why this character was forgotten.

The character 魚 is pronounced as Ngui in Taishanese (i think lol but we call fish Ngui), but pronounced Yu in Cantonese... is Ngui or Yu the original pronounciation from Middle Chinese?

If I'm not wrong, in a Yue dialect spoken in Beihai 北海 (formerly belonged to Guangdong but is now part of Guangxi), there's also another "proof" that it's 毋. They really use "mou" as their negative, even in "mou 係".
Judging from meaning, it should be 毋 not 冇.
Probably to avoid confusion, they use "毋有" for normal Cantonese "冇".

Fyi, this dialect also has the lateral fricative "sl" [ɬ] sound found in Taishanese, even though the words show vowel changes like in Standard Cantonese
I mean, you can expect 新 "slan1", 心 "slam1".
As in Taishanese, it's "s" usually corresponds to Mandarin "sh" and it's "sl" is to Mandarin "usual s".
It also has significant vowel difference with Standard Cantonese as it doesn't have -yu- or -eu-.

I think "唔" might be only suitable for Cantonese/Hakka (but not Minnan), since they treat m and ng similarly. Also why Minnan speakers use '呣' (can expect to sound like 'mu') instead.

唔 has another reading 'ng', with unrelated meaning.
Possible cause of confusion is m and ng rhymes were not found separately in 分韻 based on Nanhai 南海 and Shunde順德 dialects. (there are 50 rhymes found there, unlike "Standard Cantonese" with 53 rhymes)

I think it should have split its reading just like some other characters. When the 2 readings became significantly different, their relations are forgotten (e.g. 惜 vs "錫")

魚 is "ngư" in Sino-Vietnamese.
Baxter reconstructed it as "ngjo".

魚 is 'ng' in Hakka, again syllabic nasals preserve the initial. But then lazy sounds will wipe out the last remnant of ancient Chinese sound.

I've been pronouncing '愛' as 'ngoi' for ages. Now, wish one should I use? 'ngoi' or 'oi'?

What about '亞'? 'nga' or 'a'.

I've heard alot of ppl use 'ngoi' for 愛 ... probably because it's easier to do so in the phrase 我爱 since 我 is 'ngo', so 'ngo, ngoi' seems to roll off the lips more naturally. Technically, though, I think it should be 'oi'

亞 is definitely 'a' though.