Related Research Articles
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German ; or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh. This turbulent airflow is called frication.
Middle Chinese or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology.
A rime table or rhyme table is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used fǎnqiè analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively.
A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates characters by tone and rhyme, instead of by radical. The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the Qieyun (601), which codified correct pronunciations for reading the classics and writing poetry by combining the reading traditions of north and south China. This work became very popular during the Tang dynasty, and went through a series of revisions and expansions, of which the most famous is the Guangyun (1007–1008).
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used.
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango, is that subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.
In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simultaneous alveolar and palatal articulation. In the official IPA chart, alveolo-palatals would appear between the retroflex and palatal consonants but for "lack of space". Ladefoged and Maddieson characterize the alveolo-palatals as palatalized postalveolars (palato-alveolars), articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate, whereas Esling describes them as advanced palatals (pre-palatals), the furthest front of the dorsal consonants, articulated with the body of the tongue approaching the alveolar ridge. These descriptions are essentially equivalent, since the contact includes both the blade and body of the tongue. They are front enough that the fricatives and affricates are sibilants, the only sibilants among the dorsal consonants.
General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.
The Yunjing is one of the two oldest existing examples of a Chinese rime table – a series of charts which arrange Chinese characters in large tables according to their tone and syllable structures to indicate their proper pronunciations. Current versions of the Yunjing date to AD 1161 and 1203 editions published by Zhang Linzhi (張麟之). The original author(s) and date of composition of the Yunjing are unknown. Some of its elements, such as certain choices in its ordering, reflect features particular to the Tang dynasty, but no conclusive proof of an actual date of composition has yet been found.
The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual pronunciation varies widely among speakers, as they introduce elements of their native varieties. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese possesses a neutral tone, used on weak syllables.
Standard Cantonese pronunciation is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to Guangzhou dialect, and they diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces like Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree.
Chóngniǔ or rime doublets are certain pairs of Middle Chinese syllables that are consistently distinguished in rime dictionaries and rime tables, but without a clear indication of the phonological basis of the distinction.
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu.
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time. The oldest surviving Chinese verse, in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing), shows which words rhymed in that period. Scholars have compared these bodies of contemporary evidence with the much later Middle Chinese reading pronunciations listed in the Qieyun rime dictionary published in 601 AD, though this falls short of a phonemic analysis. Supplementary evidence has been drawn from cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages and in Min Chinese, which split off before the Middle Chinese period, Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, and early borrowings from and by neighbouring languages such as Hmong–Mien, Tai and Tocharian languages.
The Karlgren–Li reconstruction of Middle Chinese was a representation of the sounds of Middle Chinese devised by Bernhard Karlgren and revised by Li Fang-Kuei in 1971, remedying a number of minor defects.
William H. Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese is an alphabetic notation recording phonological information from medieval sources, rather than a reconstruction. It was introduced by Baxter as a reference point for his reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology.
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere. Several authors have produced reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, beginning with the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in the 1940s and continuing to the present day. The method introduced by Karlgren is unique, comparing categories implied by ancient rhyming practice and the structure of Chinese characters with descriptions in medieval rhyme dictionaries, though more recent approaches have also incorporated other kinds of evidence.
Eastern Han Chinese, Later Han Chinese or Late Old Chinese is the stage of the Chinese language revealed by poetry and glosses from the Eastern Han period . It is considered an intermediate stage between Old Chinese and the Middle Chinese of the 7th-century Qieyun dictionary.
References
- Footnotes
- ↑ Norman (1988), pp. 36–38.
- ↑ Baxter (1992), pp. 62–63.
- ↑ Schuessler (2009), pp. 8–9.
- ↑ Pan & Zhang (2015), pp. 86–87.
- ↑ Baxter (1992), pp. 75–79.
- ↑ Branner (2006), p. 24.
- ↑ Branner (2006), p. 25.
- ↑ Baxter (1992), pp. 63–81.
- Works cited
- Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-012324-1.
- ——; Sagart, Laurent (20 February 2010), Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction, Version 1.00.
- Branner, David Prager (2006), "What are rime tables and what do they mean?", in Branner, David Prager (ed.), The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic Philosophy and Historical-Comparative Phonology, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1–34, ISBN 978-90-272-4785-8. See also List of Corrigenda.
- Chan, Abraham (2004), "Early Middle Chinese Towards a New Paradigm", T'oung Pao, 90 (1/3): 122–162, doi:10.1163/1568532042523149, JSTOR 4528958.
- Karlgren, Bernhard (1957), Grammata Serica Recensa , Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, OCLC 1999753.
- Li, Fang-Kuei (1974–1975), Gilbert L. Mattos (trans.), "Studies on Archaic Chinese", Monumenta Serica, 31: 219–287.
- Newman, J.; Raman, A. V. (1999), Chinese historical phonology: a compendium of Beijing and Cantonese pronunciations of characters and their derivations from Middle Chinese, LINCOM studies in Asian linguistics, vol. 27, Munich: LINCOM Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-543-5.
- Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
- Pan, Wuyun; Zhang, Hongming (2015), "Chapter 6: Middle Chinese Phonology and Qieyun", in Wang, William S-Y; Sun, Chaofen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-1998-5633-6.
- Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (1962), "The Consonantal System of Old Chinese", Asia Major, 9: 58–144, 206–265.
- —— (1970), "Late Middle Chinese, Part I" (PDF), Asia Major, 15: 197–239.
- —— (1971), "Late Middle Chinese, Part II" (PDF), Asia Major, 16: 121–166.
- —— (1984), Middle Chinese: a study in historical phonology, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, ISBN 978-0-7748-0192-8.
- —— (1991), Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in early Middle Chinese, late Middle Chinese, and early Mandarin, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, ISBN 978-0-7748-0366-3.
- Schuessler, Axel (2009), Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-3264-3.
