Historical Chinese phonology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past.
It draws its data from rime books and rime tables of Middle Chinese era, such as Qieyun and Guangyun, modern dialects/languages such as Hakka, Mandarin, Yue, Wu, Min, etc. and from Sino-Xenic pronunciations of Chinese vocabulary such as those found in Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean (which have, unlike Chinese, historically been written according to sound). Moreover, data can also be found in the rendering of foreign words into Chinese characters where the foreign language is fairly well understood, itself having a known phonological history.
Western linguists such as Bernhard Karlgren began to study the problem of Middle Chinese around the beginning of the twentieth century. Insight to the phonology of this era was further gained with the discovery of the Qieyun in the Dunhuang Caves in the 1930's. The work had earlier been considered lost. Karlgren, who based his work on much later rime dictionaries, suggested that the Middle Chinese phonology was the language of the Sui-Tang period. Today, this view has been replaced by the idea that the reconstruction represents the widest distinction in rime categories between a number of existing dialects of the time.
The reconstruction of Old Chinese is more controversial than Middle Chinese since it extrapolates from the Middle Chinese data, but compares the riming of works of poetry such as the Shijing (詩經), one of the earliest Chinese written texts. Some insights into the phonology of Chinese in the distant past were made before Western phonological practices became known, such as the work of the Qing Dynasty scholar Duan Yucai.
Reconstruction from rime tables and foreign languages runs into one major criticism: that it does not use the actual data available today, in the form of the spoken Chinese languages. The comparative method, for example, has been almost completely unused in reconstructing Chinese phonology. The rime tables themselves have also been criticized as not being faithful chroniclers of contemporary pronunciation. Instead, critics argue, the rime tables were designed to help contemporary authors plug by then already anachronistic rimes into pre-existing poetic forms, rather than actually recording what the words sounded like.
[edit] External links
- Chinese Phonological History, Dylan W.H. Sung
- Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology, Guillume Jacques
- Periodization of Chinese Phonology, Marjorie K.M Chan
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| Categories: |
Gan | Hakka | Hui | Jin | Mandarin | Min | Ping | Xiang | Wu | Cantonese |
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| Subcategories of Min: | Min Bei | Min Dong | Min Nan | Min Zhong | Puxian | Qiongwen | Shaojiang | |||
| Subcategories of Mandarin: | Northeastern | Beijing | Ji-Lu | Jiao-Liao | Zhongyuan | Lan-Yin | Southwestern | Jianghuai | Dungan | |||
| Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many. The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories. |
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| Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects | ||||
| Official spoken varieties: | Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese | |||
| Historical phonology: | Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner | |||
| Chinese: written varieties | ||||
| Official written varieties: | Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese | |||
| Other varieties: | Written Vernacular Cantonese | |||
