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From what I can find on Wikipedia and the Internet in general, 李 is indeed pronounced that way in the Lan-nang variety of the Hokkien branch of Min Nan. There seems to be a bit of a correspondence that the "l" of most other varieties of Min Nan (from Taiwanese and AmoytoTeochew) correspond to "d" in Lan-nang (take the transcription for 'hello' on the Lan-nang page [though the "d" phoneme seems to be missing from the list of initials as of late May 2011 - they seem to have just taken the standard Taiwanese romanisation system and forgotten to change it...]; the standard Taiwanese pronunciation is given in romanised form at http://wikitravel.org/en/Minnan_phrasebook. Although I'm not a linguist at all, nor indeed a Min speaker; and I'm not sure there are many scholarly descriptions of the Lan-nang variety / other Filipino variants of Min Nan (not in English on the b, at least). Michael Ly (talk) 20:23, 29 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The phoneme /l/ in Hokkien (i.e. Minnan, 閩南話) can be pronounced as [d]or[n], depending on phonetic context. When it is followed by a nasal vowel, it is pronounced as [n]; otherwise, it is pronounced as [d]. However, according to this article (in Chinese), this [d] sound has gradually become [l] in the past few decades.
So, given that the Chinese immigrants in the Philippines are mostly Hokkien-speaking, it is not surprising (to me) that they'd use "D-" to spell this surname, which is pronounced /li3/ -> [di˥˧] in Hokkien. -- Dan (talk) 03:30, 30 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dan, thanks for that! I knew about [l]/[n] allophonic variation before, but I must say I hadn't known about the [d] realisation being an earlier one for /l/. But now on close examination of e.g. the sound files of http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/soannteng/chil/taihoa.asp, it does sound as though [d] is the more 'official' pronunciation. Phonetic realisations can be so subtle at times! But thank you! Michael Ly (talk) 18:37, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, according to some sources, it's a flap sound[ɾ]. That sounds like the Japanese /r/, Spanish single /r/, the "tt" in "butter" in some US regional dialects of English. So, you can say it's something in-between [d] and [l]. To an untrained Chinese ear, it would sound like an [l]. To other untrained ears, it may sound like a [d], depending on mother tongue. Dan (talk) 01:48, 3 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
