Strange pronunciations in Hakka song I have stumbled upon Zhang Shaolin's Hoi-nam kai-fan. I asked three translation questions about it: 1, 2 and 3. THere you find the lyrics and a link to a video, and my translation attempt. This question is to ask about the strange pronunciations that are present in some points of the song. Precisely:


来 should be pronounced loi, and is sometimes pronounced lei;
两 should be pronounced liong according to my reference, but here it is pronounced lioeng, with the same sound as Cantonese loeng (Jyutping being the used romanisation scheme, without tone), save for the extra i;
歌 should be pronounced ko, and is pronounced kuo once and fo (or rather with a sound like English hard th where I wrote f) shortly after;
张惠妹 sounds like it's pronounced the mandarin way (Hakka sounds Cong Fui-moi);
你, in its last occurrence in the last repetition of part three, sounds like it's actually a 系.


Can someone give reasons for these facts? Is the final 你 a typo perhaps? And also, can someone provide me with tone marks (or tone numbers, and naturally an explanation of the contours) for the whole lyrics?
I had a second (tenth?) listen, and extracted the sound to an mp3. Then I put this through Praat. I noticed something interesting:

This is the first occurrence of 來, around 72 seconds in:

齐家吃开晓来称赞



This is the second occurrence of 來, around 121 seconds in:

明星或歌星日日来帮衬



The first one is definitely [lɔi], whereas the second one is definitely [lei], and the sonogram confirms it. The second image, with the dense formation in the middle, trailing off into a lighter line is an [ei].

In this case it could be an influence from Cantonese -- Zhang is from Selangor -- where 嚟 is often pronounced lei.

Same around 2mn14 where 来 in 按好吃讲只只来帮衬 is [lei].
So it seems Zhang alternates freely loi and lei.

As for 歌 I had a look with Praat at only the first one (最近做歌星讲好难) -- it's getting late here :-) -- but this one is go1. I confirmed it by listening to it isolately, and looking at its sonogram -- it has the same profile as 近 and 讲). But listening to the full sentence it comes out a little weird, as if it were spirantized.

I'll have a deeper look tomorrow.

ADDENDUM 1


两 should be pronounced liong according to my reference, but here it is pronounced lioeng --> Seems like it indeed As you say, probable influence of Canto.
张惠妹 sounds like it's pronounced the mandarin way --> Yup.
你, in its last occurrence in the last repetition of part three, sounds like it's actually a 系.


That'd be at 4:41 thereabouts.



If you compare this sonogram with the second one, [lei], you see it's kind of similar -- the vowel is basically the same, except it doesn't weaken into [-i]. It's [e:].

Compare this with the 你 at 4:13:



No [e:] here. That's a nice [i:], quite long too. That's quite expected as 你 is ngi2.

As for the initial. In the suspicious 你, look at the initial in the sonogram, and compare it with the sonograms of [loi] and [lei], especially the latter. You have very similar patterns, albeit weaker for 你. I believe Zhang kind of reverted to Cantonese [lei]. The [l-] is there but devoiced (the lower dark line at the beginning of [lei] is barely there). I believe it's a voiceless [l], that can be heard as a [h].

ADDENDUM 2

Regarding Hakka tones, I used Dr Lau's PinFaa data to build a dictionary, which I added into my own little online tool. The tone contours are from [this page]: