| Qi Lin Bayin | |||||||||||
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| Chinese | 戚林八音 | ||||||||||
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The Qi Lin Bayin,sometimes translated as Book of Eight Sounds or Book of Eight Tones,is a Chinese rime book of approximately ten thousand characters based on the earlier form of the Fuzhou dialect. First compiled in the 17th century,it is the pioneering work of all written sources for Min languages,and is widely quoted in modern academic research in Chinese phonology.
The Qi Lin Bayin is a combination of two dictionaries:
The combined edition was published in 1749 by Jin An,a citizen of Fuzhou,who added a foreword. [1] As local works,the earlier dictionaries were largely ignored by the scholarly tradition,so inferences about their date and authorship are necessarily based on internal evidence. [3]
The Qī is named in honour of Qi Jiguang,a general who led a mission to evict pirates from Fujian between 1562 and 1567,and presumably dates from the late 16th century. However,it is unlikely that Qi himself was the author,as he was a native of Shandong and spent only a few years in the area,and the book is not mentioned in his official biography. [4] Luo Changpei and other scholars have suggested that the book was written or compiled by the scholar Chen Di,who served in Qi's army,and later made major contributions to Chinese philology. [4] However,there are numerous differences between the Qī and Chen's known works. [5] Most modern authors believe the book to be the work of one Cài Shìpàn (蔡士泮),who is credited in the dictionary with "collecting and editing" the work,but is otherwise unknown. [6] [7]
The Lín appears to be patterned on the structure of the Qī. It is named in honour of Lín Bìshān (林碧山),a native of Minhou County who served as an official in Hebei shortly after passing the advanced examination in 1688. Although the book is believed to date from the end of the 17th century,Lin is not known to have produced any scholarly works. [8] As with the Qī,the Lín is attributed by most modern scholars to an otherwise-unknown person recorded as having edited it,Chén Tā(陳他). [6] [9]
The tonal categories of Fuzhou dialect have remained stable since the time of QīLín Bāyīn. In the book title,Bāyīn (lit. eight sounds) denotes eight tones,whose names are:(1) 上平,(2) 上上,(3) 上去,(4) 上入,(5) 下平,(6) 下上,(7) 下去,and (8) 下入. But the sixth tone 下上is actually identical with the second one 上上and therefore exists in theory only. In other words,Fuzhou dialect has seven rather than eight tones,and the term Bāyīn is something of a misnomer.
However,due to the lack of phonetic descriptions of the seven tones,the deduction of the tonal values of that time is considered beyond possibility.
In QīLín Bāyīn,the fifteen initials are organized into a five-character shī (the last five characters "打掌與君知" are simply used to make up the four lines as a whole),as follows: [6] [10]
| 柳邊求氣低, | [l],[p],[k],[kʰ],[t] |
| 波他曾日時, | [pʰ],[tʰ],[ts],[n],[s] |
| 鶯蒙語出非, | null initial ,[m],[ŋ],[tsʰ],[h] |
| 打掌與君知. |
In spite of the perceptible confluence of [n] and [l] in modern Fuzhou dialect,the initial structure nowadays is by and large the same as it was in the time of QīLín Bāyīn.
Likewise,a cí is built up in QīLín Bāyīn by all thirty-three rimes in the then Fuzhou dialect (three characters,"金","梅" and "遮",are redundant),as follows: [6] [11]
| 春花香, | [uŋ/uk],[ua/uaʔ],[ioŋ/iok] |
| 秋山開, | [iu],[aŋ/ak],[ai] |
| 嘉賓歡歌須金杯. | [a/aʔ],[iŋ/ik],[uaŋ/uak],[o/oʔ],[y],redundant,[uoi] |
| 孤燈光輝燒銀缸. | [u/uʔ],[ɛŋ/ɛk],[uoŋ/uok],[ui],[ieu],[yŋ/yk],[oŋ/ok] |
| 之東郊, | [i],[øŋ/øk],[au] |
| 過西橋. | [uo/uoʔ],[ɛ/ɛʔ],[io/ioʔ] |
| 雞聲催初天, | [ie],[iaŋ/iak],[øy],[œ/œʔ],[ieŋ/iek] |
| 奇梅歪遮溝. | [ia/iaʔ],redundant,[uai],redundant,[ɛu] |
The past couple of centuries witnessed three major changes in Fuzhou dialect. The first is the phenomenon of close/open rimes,by which the 上去,上入and 下去characters shift its rime to its open form under certain circumstances;the second is the merger of [iu] and [ieu],as well as [ui] and [uoi];and the last is the confusion of the codas [-k] and [-ʔ].
For centuries,the Qi Lin Bayin had been used by local people as an authoritative reference on the Fuzhou pronunciation. It also greatly assisted the earliest Western missionaries in Fuzhou in learning and studying the native language. [12] The American Methodist missionary M.C. White published the first Western description of the Fuzhou dialect. [13] White based his account of the phonology directly on the Qi Lin Bayin,writing:
The system of initials and finals used in the 'Book of Eight Tones', would, if used for that purpose, form (in connection with the tonal marks) a complete alphabet for the Fuh Chau dialect. They have been so used by missionaries for writing colloquial phrases, in their private study of the language. Three of the gospels have been written out in this manner by Chinese teachers in the employment of missionaries.
— M.C. White [14]
To obtain a more convenient system than the Chinese characters naming the initials and finals, White spelled out each of them using the Latin-based alphabet devised by the English philologist Sir William Jones to represent languages of India, the Pacific and North America. [15] He thus produced the first published romanization of the language. The scheme consists of fourteen consonants (the null initial is not written) and nine vowels: [16] [17]
White's romanization was adjusted by later authors, and became standardized as Foochow Romanized (Bàng-uâ-cê) several decades later.
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 more recently recovered 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.
Fanqie is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one with the same rest of the syllable . The method was introduced in the 3rd century AD and used in dictionaries and commentaries on the classics until the early 20th century.
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).
The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, or Hu language, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shanghainese, like the rest of the Wu language group, is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese, such as Mandarin.
Eastern Min or Min Dong, is a branch of the Min group of Sinitic languages of China. The prestige form and most-cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian.
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 Fuzhou language, also Foochow, Hokchew, Hok-chiu, or Fuzhounese, is the prestige variety of the Eastern Min branch of Min Chinese spoken mainly in the Mindong region of Eastern Fujian Province. As it is mutually unintelligible to neighbouring varieties in the province, under a technical linguistic definition Fuzhou is a language and not a dialect. Thus, while Fuzhou may be commonly referred to as a 'dialect' by laypersons, this is colloquial usage and not recognised in academic linguistics. Like many other varieties of Chinese, the Fuzhou dialect is dominated by monosyllabic morphemes that carry lexical tones, and has a mainly analytic syntax. While the Eastern Min branch it belongs to is relatively closer to Southern Min or Hokkien than to other Sinitic branches such as Mandarin, Wu Chinese or Hakka, they are still not mutually intelligible.
Zhongyuan Yinyun, literally meaning "Rhymes of the central plain", is a rime book from the Yuan dynasty compiled by Zhou Deqing (周德清) in 1324. An important work for the study of historical Chinese phonology, it testifies many phonological changes from Middle Chinese to Old Mandarin, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones. Though often termed a "rime dictionary", the work does not provide meanings for its entries.
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Separating the checked tone allows -p, -t, and -k to be treated as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng, respectively, since they are in complementary distribution. Stops appear only in the checked tone, and nasals appear only in the other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables. In Chinese phonetics, they have traditionally been counted separately.
Foochow Romanized, also known as Bàng-uâ-cê or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê, is a Latin alphabet for the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min adopted in the middle of the 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of church circles, and was taught in some mission schools in Fuzhou. However, unlike its counterpart Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien, even in its prime days Foochow Romanized was by no means universally understood by Christians.
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The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology are four traditional tone classes of Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of tonal development in the modern varieties of Chinese, both in traditional Chinese and in Western linguistics. They correspond to the phonology of Middle Chinese, and are named even or level, rising, departing or going, and entering or checked. They were reconstructed as mid, mid rising, high falling, and mid with a final stop consonant respectively. Due to historic splits and mergers, none of the modern varieties of Chinese have the exact four tones of Middle Chinese, but they are noted in rhyming dictionaries.
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Shaxian dialect is a dialect of Central Min Chinese spoken in Sha County, Sanming in Western Fujian Province of China.
The Matsu dialect is the local dialect of Matsu Islands, Taiwan. Native speakers also call it Bàng-huâ (平話), meaning the language spoken in everyday life. It is recognised as one of the statutory languages for public transport announcements in Lienchiang County, Taiwan.
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai or the Hàn-Yīng yùnfǔ 漢英韻府, compiled by the American sinologist and missionary Samuel Wells Williams in 1874, is a 1,150-page bilingual dictionary including 10,940 character headword entries, alphabetically collated under 522 syllables. Williams' dictionary includes, in addition to Mandarin, Chinese variants from Middle Chinese and four regional varieties of Chinese, according to the 17th-century Wufang yuanyin 五方元音 "Proto-sounds of Speech in All Directions".
In Chinese dialectology, Beijing Mandarin refers to a major branch of Mandarin Chinese recognized by the Language Atlas of China, encompassing a number of dialects spoken in areas of Beijing, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, and Tianjin, the most important of which is the Beijing dialect, which provides the phonological basis for Standard Chinese. Both Beijing Mandarin and its Beijing dialect are also called Beijingese.
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