A study of literary and colloquial Amoy Chinese
厦门话的文白异读研究
Margaret M. Y. Sung 严棉

Abstract 摘要
In every Chinese dialect, there is the phenomenon of literary and colloquial readings of characters. But in Amoy, the difference of the literary versus colloquial pronunciation is so great that they might be treated as two parallel phonological systems of one language. In the present study, in addition to an observational comparison of these two systems, the date of waves of immigration from Northern China into the Southern Min area, the intersecting relationships, and the different rates of sound changes as causes of their differences, are proposed. A considerable amount of heterogeneity, as the result of the on-going process of sound change in the stop and nasal endings of the literary and colloquial Amoy, support Chen’s (1973) parallelism hypothesis of the evolution of the stop and nasal endings in Chinese dialects. They are also taken as an empirical evidence for Wang’s (1969) lexical diffusion theory.