It sounds like a little bit of everything. Both Hokkien and Cantonese retain some features that we think were part of Tang-era Guanhua. It's important to remember that this construction is very preliminary. First, we just don't have enough evidence to reconstruct securely. Second, even if you have a solid reconstruction in terms of the phonemes, that doesn't always tell you how something sounds. Think about what a Alabama drawl sounds like compared to a Glaswegian. They're speaking the same language, but factors like speed, rhythm, and accent can make a massive difference. So whether Du Fu really sounded like that is anyone's guess.
I wouldn't have included readings, but lots of readers asked for them, and this guy Cinix (I don't know him at all, just found his recordings on Youtube) did such a great job of giving a comprehensive reading of the most popular poetry, that I thought it was worth sticking in. The readings do one thing which I think is important: they make the rhymes clear. An important part of my approach to the translations is that they've got to have some kind of rhythm or rhyme, because the source poems do, and these readings back that up very nicely.
I cannot get my head around the reconstruction at all. I mean at all! It sounds to me vaguely Hokkien?
It sounds like a little bit of everything. Both Hokkien and Cantonese retain some features that we think were part of Tang-era Guanhua. It's important to remember that this construction is very preliminary. First, we just don't have enough evidence to reconstruct securely. Second, even if you have a solid reconstruction in terms of the phonemes, that doesn't always tell you how something sounds. Think about what a Alabama drawl sounds like compared to a Glaswegian. They're speaking the same language, but factors like speed, rhythm, and accent can make a massive difference. So whether Du Fu really sounded like that is anyone's guess.
I wouldn't have included readings, but lots of readers asked for them, and this guy Cinix (I don't know him at all, just found his recordings on Youtube) did such a great job of giving a comprehensive reading of the most popular poetry, that I thought it was worth sticking in. The readings do one thing which I think is important: they make the rhymes clear. An important part of my approach to the translations is that they've got to have some kind of rhythm or rhyme, because the source poems do, and these readings back that up very nicely.
maybe more like Hakka dialect？