So I've come across a book called 粵音自學手冊, and there's a big section stating the "frequent mispronunciation" and the supposed "correct pronunciation". One of them is 閩. The book cites the Guangyun (TCC: Kwâng-wun) and says that the pronunciation should be man4 not man5. Now typing man4naam4 on my Jyutping input doesn't return that character, but man5naam4 does. But this isn't a good indicator of "correct" pronunciation since it allows n- characters to be inputted as l- anyway.
But is using the Guangyun, or in Cantonese, Gwong-wan, to predict the correct pronunciation really reliable? I mean sure, Cantonese descended from Middle Chinese but languages themselves could have shifts that don't follow discovered rules, like how the Received Pronunciation /ʊə/ corresponds to either Australian English /ʉ:.ə/ or /o:/ without a conceivable pattern.
General Chinese is a "diaphoneme" developed by Chao that is meant to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters in all Chinese languages simultaneously, but just from the example given, it already failed to distinguish between the Cantonese 野 and 也, both being "yee".
I'm not sure how well the Mandarin tones correspond to the Middle Chinese tones, but the character 閩 is also pronounced with a rising tone in Mandarin anyway, so it doesn't correspond to the Gwangyun.
The thing I'd want to discuss is whether it's accurate to use the Gwangyun to overthrow an existing common pronunciation. This type of practice has been described as prescriptive as most people pronounce words a certain way and someone just comes out and say they're all wrong, despite how the pronunciation came from older generations and not this generation being lazy:
[en.wikipedia.org]
I am far from being an expert on this subject though. What do you think?
But is using the Guangyun, or in Cantonese, Gwong-wan, to predict the correct pronunciation really reliable? I mean sure, Cantonese descended from Middle Chinese but languages themselves could have shifts that don't follow discovered rules, like how the Received Pronunciation /ʊə/ corresponds to either Australian English /ʉ:.ə/ or /o:/ without a conceivable pattern.
General Chinese is a "diaphoneme" developed by Chao that is meant to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters in all Chinese languages simultaneously, but just from the example given, it already failed to distinguish between the Cantonese 野 and 也, both being "yee".
I'm not sure how well the Mandarin tones correspond to the Middle Chinese tones, but the character 閩 is also pronounced with a rising tone in Mandarin anyway, so it doesn't correspond to the Gwangyun.
The thing I'd want to discuss is whether it's accurate to use the Gwangyun to overthrow an existing common pronunciation. This type of practice has been described as prescriptive as most people pronounce words a certain way and someone just comes out and say they're all wrong, despite how the pronunciation came from older generations and not this generation being lazy:
[en.wikipedia.org]
I am far from being an expert on this subject though. What do you think?