Cantonese nasal-stop alternation

The phonological alternation

Apart from phonetical association, the homorganic pairs are also semantically related. For some characters (or words) with syllables ending in nasals, there are semantically similar characters which have the homorganic stops. For example, both dam3 揼 and “dap1” 耷 means ‘to hang down’. The initial consonants and the vowels of the alternating pair are identical while the terminal nasal /–m/ and stop /–p/ are a homorganic pair. In Cantonese phonology, this interesting phenomenon is known as nasal-stop alternation (陽入對轉), mainly an alternation of homorganic consonants between nasal and stop finals. In other dialects, it could be oral-nasal or oral-stop alternation.

Regarding the initial consonants, a few items may alternate between aspirated and unaspirated initial stops, e.g. “kim4” 拑 ‘to pinch’ and “gip6” 挟 ‘to squeeze together’. As for tones, high or low tones on syllables with nasal codas usually (but not always) correspond to high or low tones on syllables with stop codas, e.g. “ngam4” 吟 ‘to grumble’ has a low tone whereas “ngap1” 噏 ‘to babble’ has a high tone.

Many of these characters are colloquial verbs which lack standard Chinese characters as their written forms. For example, there is not a widely accepted character for “jip3”, ‘to pickle in salt’. Consequently, the homorganic character “jim1” 腌 is also used to represent both syllables. The same is true for ‘‘doeŋ3’’ 啄 ‘to peck’ being used to stand for ‘‘doek1’’ as well.

As for their semantics or usage, the paired characters are not completely equivalent or interchangeable in every case. The colloquial verb “kam2” 冚 seems to be more commonly used than the corresponding “kap1” 扱, both meaning ‘to cover on top’. On the other hand, “fiŋ6” 捹 and “fik6” 扐 both mean ‘to throw away; to swing an object in the hand’ and are interchangeable; the same is also true for “niŋ1” 拎 and “nik1” 搦 ‘to carry in the hand’.