Implied ng?

[Noah]

I've noticed with a couple of words I've learned (oi3 and aap3, or love and duck) that when I hear native recordings of the words they sound very much more like they start with an ng sound (so ngoi3 and ngaap3).

Is this sound typically applied to words that begin with a vowel? Is there some other rule(s) to when/if to apply it? Am I just hearing things?

Thanks in advance...

[community.cantonese]

Hello Noah,

The correct pronunciation should be 愛(oi3) and 鴨(app3) / 鴨(app2). 鴨(app3) and 鴨(app2) can be used interchangeably.
You hear people start with the "ng" sound and it is just the "lazy sound" phenomenon.

Pronunciation among native Cantonese speakers in China can be different from that of Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. A lot of people in Hong Kong, especially the younger generations, use a lot of their own conversational slang and tend to speak what we'll call a "lazy tone." An example is the word "you." The right way to pronounce "you" is [nei] and people who speak in a lazy tone will pronounce "you" as [lei].

Siuling
Team CantoneseClass101.com

[Noah]

唔該! (m4 goi1)

A poster on a different forum informed me this version of "lazy speech" was a sort of "hypercorrection" as seen in this wiki page.

In the Chinese section of the page they explain it as follows:

In Cantonese, some speakers omit the initial {ŋ}. For instance, the character 牙 (Jyutping: ngaa4, meaning "tooth"), ends up being pronounced "aa4". Prescriptivists tend to consider these changes as substandard and denounce them for being "lazy sounds" (Chinese: 懶音; Jyutping: laan5 jam1). However, in a case of hypercorrection, some speakers have started pronouncing words that should have a null initial using an initial {ŋ}, even though according to historical Chinese phonology, only words with light tones (which correspond to tones 4, 5, and 6 in Jyutping) had voiced initials (which includes {ŋ}). Because of this hypercorrection, words such as 愛 (Jyutping: oi3, meaning "love"), which has a dark tone, are pronounced by speakers with an {ŋ} initial, "ngoi3".

[community.cantonese]

Hello Noah,

Thank you for sharing this information with us.


Siuling
Team CantoneseClass101.com