Rime table

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A rime table or rhyme table (Chinese: 韻圖/韵图; pinyin: yùntú; Wade-Giles: yün-t'u) is a syllable chart of Chinese used in ancient China. As China's native phonological model, it tabulates the syllables by their onsets, rimes, grades of rime, tones and other properties.

Tradition holds that rime tables were invented by Buddhist monks, who were inspired by the syllable charts of Sanskrit they used to study the language. The Song Dynasty Yunjing and Qiyin lüe are the oldest extant rime tables. Based on numerous internal similarities, linguists conclude they shared a common prototype of phonological tables with accompanying texts, a tradition that may date back to the late Tang Dynasty (Baxter 1992: 41).

A recent book (Branner 2006) surveys current scholarship in the field of rime table theory.

1 Terminology
2 Structure
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Terminology

The onset, often called "initial" for Chinese (shengmu 聲母 lit. "sound mother"), is usually a consonant, but when it begins with a vowel, it is said to have a "zero initial." Rime tables followed the Yunjing distinction of 36 initial consonants, and used phonation to divide them between voiceless (qing 清 "clear") and voiced (zhuo 濁 "muddy"). These tables distinguished five places of articulation: labials (chun 脣 "lips"), linguals (she 舌 "tongue"), dentals (chi 齒 "front teeth"), velars (ya 牙 "back teeth"), and gutturals (hou 喉 "throat").
The yun (韻), see rhyme dictionary. Similar yun can be grouped into she (攝), from 206 into 16 or 13.
The rime (Chinese yunmu 韻母 lit. "rime mother") structure is analyzed into the semivowel (or glide), main vowel, and syllable coda (or ending).
The grades of rime: there are various interpretations for the four types of rime called deng (等 "class", "grade" or "group"), which Bernhard Karlgren translated as "divisions" while other linguists prefer "grades". The grades have to do with the places of articulation (back vs. front) and the presence or absence of the glide -i-. To illustrate the significance of deng, the science of classifying vowels is called dengyun (等韻 "division rime") and traditional phonology is dengyunxue (等韻學 "division rime study").
For the tone (shengdiao 聲調 "sound intonation"), rime tables followed the Qieyun division of Chinese syllables into four tone names.
To complicate the matter, syllables are also divided into "inner" (nei 內) and "outer" (wai 外) categories, thought to be related to the vocalic heights contrasting close vowels and open vowels. A further categorization was between "open" (kai 開) and "closed" (he 合), which are interpreted to indicate the presence or absence of [w] or [u].

[edit] Structure

We will take Yunjing as an example to illustrate what a rime table is. Yungjing comprises of 43 charts, following is the first one:

The five big characters on the right-hand side read Neizhuan Diyihe (內轉第一開). In Yunjing, each chart is called a zhuan (lit. "turn"). The characters indicate that the chart is the first (第一) one in the book, and that the syllables of this chart are "inner" (內) and "open" (開). There are 23 columns for the 36 onsets. Some onsets, as the rimes in which occur in complementary distribution, have been grouped together. There are 16 rows: four for each yun (the level-toned 東, the rising-toned 董, the departing-toned 送, and the entering-toned 屋). Within each yun, the rimes are divided into four grades. The symbol ○ indicates that there is no character with that particular syllable.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Baxter, William H. (1992). A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-012324-X
Branner, David Prager (ed.) (2006). The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-4785-4