Character 瞓: where did the pronunciations come from? The character 瞓 is a Cantonese character meaning "sleep". It is pronounced xùn in mandarin and fan3 in Cantonese. I was wondering how two so different pronunciations (I would expect xun to match syun or similar and fan to match fen or similar) came into being. I did some research. The Wiktionary has pronunciations mén, mèn, shuì for Mandarin and fan3 for Cantonese. mdbg.net has xùn on the main display, but opening the dictionary entry (clicking on the character) reveals shuì and fan3. Baike baidu has fèn, which finally matches the Cantonese. CantoDict, however, has kùn and fan3, and states the origin is 困, which in Cantonese means "sleepy", plus three other very different meanings, according to CantoDict, but is pronounced kwan3. So the Cantonese sound is definitely fan3, but the Mandarin sound? THe shuì pronunciation suggests a pronunciation loan induced by meaning. The other pronunciations seem totally unrelated. fèn matches the Cantonese sound, but the origin of the character is pronounced kùn, curiously matching the CantoDict Mandarin sound of this character. So:


How was it pronounced in older times (i.e. Middle Chinese)?
How did the pronunciations come into being?
Which is the correct Mandarin sound?
If there are more, how did they come into being? Were there semantic loans at any point?
Could xùn be a misspelling of kùn? It is given by baike in several instances, though.
Could mén, mèn be distortions of fèn?


Hope I was clear. My info on this character is very messy :).

Update

Wiktionary has since updated its pronunciations to fèn-fan3. The original mén/mèn/shuì were added by Rukhabot in an edit dated 22:30, 18 August 2012, and removed by Suzukaze-c's 05:30, 22 September 2015 revision. I wonder where that bot got those pronunciations…
How was it pronounced in older times (i.e. Middle Chinese)?
  


I haven't found a record of 瞓 in classical Chinese, but since 瞓 and 训 are both read as fan in Cantonese, I'll take 训 instead. It is read qhuns in reconstructed Old Chinese that is before the 1st century B.C.  In Middle Chinese it is pronounced as hyonh.


  
  How did the pronunciations come into being?
  


If you mean 瞓, it is obvious that it's created after 训 as a phono-semantic character or 形声字. the x in Mandarin xun comes from qh, then to hy, then to x. The f in Cantonese fan might have come into being along the qh -&gt; hy -&gt; h -&gt; f route. 


  
  Which is the correct Mandarin sound?
  


瞓 isn't a Mandarin word. The dictionaries say it's fèn and it comes from Hokkien or Cantonese. fèn is an approximation of the sound in the dialects. 


  
  If there are more, how did they come into being? Were there semantic loans at any point?
  


If you mean more of "dialectic words" that don't exist in Mandarin such as 瞓, there are quite a few. They exist because there are no counterparts in Mandarin or rather classical Chinese, so people have to make new characters for these words. I don't think semantic loan happened here, but it does involve borrowing existing characters to make new ones.


  
  Could xùn be a misspelling of kùn?
  


It's not misspelling. See answers to question #1 and #2. k to x shift is possible. Similar is the case in western languages where the hard c (read k) shifts to a soft c which sounds similar to the Chinese x.


  
  Could mén, mèn be distortions of fèn?
  


Not impossible: m -&gt; w -&gt; v -&gt; f, For example, in Chinese we have 没(m) 无(w) 否(f) all mean no. But regarding to your question, we need to know who uses the sound men and when it is used. In most online Chinese dictionaries 瞓 is pronounced as fèn, I didn't found any references to men.