A language learners’ forum

Axon wrote:

Deinonysus wrote: The original Middle Chinese palatals were not preserved in Mandarin, because they were merged with the retroflex series. I believe the new palatal series in Mandarin started out as a phonetic, not phonemic, distinction where the alveolars would become palatal before an i, but it became phonemic after the deletion of some i medials.

I think it would still be considered a phonetic difference since are no minimal pairs in Mandarin with only a palatal/non-palatal consonant distinction. The palatal series in Mandarin evolved from dental, velar, and glottal stops and fricatives all becoming palatal before high front vowels.

Thanks for the correction!

Finally found one source that at least acknowledges the phenomenon. Gabriel Wyner (I think in this forum at least some know of him), notes that before back rounded vowels (IPA /y/ /oe/ /ɔ/), Jyutping z/c (IPA /ts/ unaspirated and aspirated), sound more like zh/ch to his ears (IPA /ʃ/). I would include /ʊ/ as well because in "China", zung1gwok3 (with /zʊng/), the "z" also sounds like some sort of /ʃ/. Since /ʊ/ is a front rounded vowel, this lends strong credence to Querneus percipient observation about young people democratizing this sound before all vowels with the apparent exceptions of the most open ones in Cantonese's vowel inventory (namely the "a" values). Which goes far beyond Wyner's assessment.

As I think I said earlier, to me they sound to be more a halfway between alveolar zh/ch and labiodental z/c. Wyner does point out what we have noticed here ourselves, that there is little literature there is out there about it, or probably more accurately, the materials insist on hanging on to the traditional but dated standard.

Fluent Forever Cantonese pronunciation Video 2 (@7:14):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_KV0FXPTY

outcast wrote:back rounded vowels (IPA /y/ /oe/ /ɔ/)

Aren't /y/ and /oe/ front vowels?