OldBoring wrote:To be fair though, it may not be necessarily an intentionally created mnemonics.
if I catch him I'll beat him
I guess the g becomes k because of assonance with 橄榄.
Not sure what you mean by "assonance" here. In English, "assonance" means repeating the same (or similar) vowel sounds, usually in literature or poetry. Do you just mean "similarity"? Or maybe you meant the g becomes k by analogy with 橄榄?
And in many Chinese languages (I've noticed the same in other Asian languages) s-like consonants + affricates [insert phonetic term here] alveolar sibilants can only go with certain types of vowels, not with i/j or y/ɥ;, which require ɕ-like consonants + affricates [again, insert phonetic term] palatal (or "palato-alveolal" if you really want to be that precise, I guess) sibilants.
Yeah, a lot of languages have a distribution that's something like that, maybe not with exactly the same sounds but still alveolar sibilant vs. palatal(ish) sibilant. Polish, for example, has the same thing. It doesn't have [y] or [ɥ], but it does have [ɕ] and its voiced equivalent [ʑ].
So, for most Chinese -[-t͡s(ʰ)je] is not pronounceable. They either say -[-t͡s(ʰ)e] by deleting the j, or -[-t͡ɕ(ʰ)i̯e] by changing the consonant.
They can say -[t͡s(ʰ)e]? Nice.