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76-709: Zhengzhang Shangfang (9 August 1933 – 19 May 2018) was a Chinese linguist, known for his reconstruction of Old Chinese . Zhengzhang was born as Zheng Xiangfang ( 郑祥芳 Zhèng Xiángfāng ) in Yongjia County , on the outskirts of Wenzhou . As 祥 and 尚 have the same pronunciation in the Wenzhou dialect , his personal name became Shangfang ( 尚芳 ). While in high school, his parents changed his family name to Zhengzhang, which combined his father's surname Zheng with his mother's surname Zhang . At this time, he became interested in historical phonology and studied

152-504: A narrow transcription of the sounds of the standard language of the Tang dynasty . Beginning with his Analytical Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1923), he compared these sounds across groups of words written with Chinese characters with the same phonetic component . Noting that such words were not always pronounced identically in Middle Chinese, he postulated that their initials had

228-461: A vowel considered to have a "zero initial". Initials are classified according to The order of the places and manners roughly match that of Sanskrit , providing further evidence of inspiration from Indian phonology. Each table had 16 rows, with a group of four rows for each of the four tones of the Qieyun . The above chart covers four parallel Guangyun rhyme groups, the level-toned 東 dōng ,

304-431: A character for a similarly sounding word with a semantic indicator. Often characters sharing a phonetic element (forming a phonetic series) are still pronounced alike, as in the character 中 ( zhōng , 'middle'), which was adapted to write the words chōng ('pour', 沖) and zhōng ('loyal', 忠). In other cases the words in a phonetic series have very different sounds both in Middle Chinese and in modern varieties. Since

380-474: A common point of articulation in an earlier phase he called "Archaic Chinese", but which is now usually called Old Chinese . For example, he postulated velar consonants as initials in the series In rarer cases where different types of initials occurred in the same series, as in he postulated initial clusters *kl- and *gl-. Karlgren believed that the voiced initials of Middle Chinese were aspirated, and projected these back onto Old Chinese. He also proposed

456-442: A compact presentation. The symbol ○ indicates that that particular syllable does not occur. Bernard Karlgren noticed that classes of finals from the rime dictionaries were placed in different rows of the rime tables. As three classes of final occurred in the first, second and fourth rows respectively, he named them finals of divisions I, II and IV. The remaining finals he called "division-III finals" because they occurred in

532-460: A consistent distinction within each rhyme group in the rime books is reflected in the rime tables by dividing the rhyme group between rows 2 and 4, often in adjacent tables. Li Rong , in a systematic comparison of the rhyme tables with a recently discovered early edition of the Qieyun , identified seven classes of finals. The table below lists the combinations of initial and final classes that occur in

608-569: A consistent feature of Chinese poetry. While much old poetry still rhymes in modern varieties of Chinese, Chinese scholars have long noted exceptions. This was attributed to lax rhyming practice of early poets until the late- Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di argued that a former consistency had been obscured by sound change . This implied that the rhyming practice of ancient poets recorded information about their pronunciation. Scholars have studied various bodies of poetry to identify classes of rhyming words at different periods. The oldest such collection

684-455: A full set of aspirated nasals, as well as Yakhontov's labio-velar and labio-laryngeal initials. Pulleyblank also accepted Yakhontov's expanded role for the medial *-l-, which he noted was cognate with Tibeto-Burman *-r-. To account for phonetic contacts between Middle Chinese l- and dental initials, he also proposed an aspirated lateral *lh-. Pulleyblank also distinguished two sets of dental series, one derived from Old Chinese dental stops and

760-615: A new series of labio-velar and labio-laryngeal initials, or from the breaking of a vowel *-o- to -wa- before dental codas. Yakhontov proposed a simpler seven-vowel system: However, these vowels had an uneven distribution, with *ä and *â almost in complementary distribution and *ü occurring only in open syllables and before *-k. His final consonants were the nasals *-m, *-n and *-ng, corresponding stops *-p, *-t and *-k, as well as *-r, which became -j or disappeared in Middle Chinese. The Canadian sinologist Edwin Pulleyblank published

836-418: A reconstruction of the consonants of Old Chinese in two parts in 1962. In addition to new analyses of the traditional evidence, he also made substantial use of transcription evidence. Though not a full reconstruction, Pulleyblank's work has been very influential, and many of his proposals are now widely accepted. Pulleyblank adapted Dong Tonghe 's proposal of a voiceless counterpart to the initial *m, proposing

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912-481: A reconstruction that, with minor variations, is still in wide use in China. For the initials, Wang largely followed Karlgren, but in later revisions recast Karlgren's voiced stops as voiced fricatives and a palatal lateral, re-interpreting the aspirated voiced stops and affricates as merely voiced. Wang refined the rhyme classes, distinguishing the 脂 zhī and 微 wēi classes. In his reconstruction, each rhyme class

988-529: A series of unaspirated voiced initials to account for other correspondences, but later workers have discarded these in favour of alternative explanations. Karlgren accepted the argument of the Qing philologist Qian Daxin that the Middle Chinese dental and retroflex stop series were not distinguished in Old Chinese, but otherwise proposed the same points of articulation in Old Chinese as in Middle Chinese. This led him to

1064-407: A six-vowel system and a re-organized system of liquids . Earlier systems proposed voiced final stops to account for contacts between stop-final syllables and other tones, but many investigators now believe that Old Chinese lacked tonal distinctions, with Middle Chinese tones derived from consonant clusters at the end of the syllable. The major sources for the sounds of Old Chinese, covering most of

1140-466: A stop, e.g. He suggested that the departing tone words in such pairs had ended with a final voiced stop ( *-d or *-ɡ ) in Old Chinese. To account for occasional contacts between Middle Chinese finals -j and -n , Karlgren proposed that -j in such pairs derived from Old Chinese *-r . He believed there was insufficient evidence to support definitive statements about Old Chinese tones. Wang Li made extensive studies of Shijing rhymes and produced

1216-419: A valuable reference for students of Old Chinese, and characters are routinely identified by their GSR position. Karlgren's remained the most commonly used until it was superseded by the system of Li Fang-Kuei in the 1970s. In his Études sur la phonologie chinoise (1915–1926), Karlgren produced the first complete reconstruction of Middle Chinese (which he called "Ancient Chinese"). He presented his system as

1292-573: A version of the Yunjing published with prefaces dated 1161 and 1203, and the Qiyin lüe , which was included in the 1161 encyclopedia Tongzhi . The two are very similar, and are believed to be derived from a single version pre-dating the Song dynasty . The tables were accompanied by a body of teachings known as ménfǎ ( 門法 'school precepts'), including rules for placing fanqie spellings that did not conform to

1368-548: A voiced initial, though scholars are divided on which form is basic. In the earliest period, Chinese was spoken in the valley of the Yellow River , surrounded by neighbouring languages, some of whose relatives, particularly Austroasiatic and the Kra–Dai and Miao–Yao languages , are still spoken today. The earliest borrowings in both directions provide further evidence of Old Chinese sounds, though complicated by uncertainty about

1444-423: 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

1520-446: Is characterized by its main vowel and coda. To account for Middle Chinese divisions and open/closed distinctions, Wang reconstructed medials: Wang argued that Old Chinese distinguished long and short syllables, the former being higher in pitch, and that the four tones of Middle Chinese were derived from the combination of length and the distinction between open and stop-final syllables: In particular, he argued that length caused

1596-400: 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. The earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by

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1672-465: Is offered by fragments from Dunhuang . A fragment held by the British Library (Or.8210/S.512) simply lists 30 initial consonants. Another document includes three fragments attributed to a monk called Shǒuwēn ( 守溫 ), who may have lived as early as the 9th century. These fragments do not contain tables, but describe the phonological analysis that underlies them. The oldest known rhyme tables are

1748-534: Is the Shijing , containing songs ranging from the 10th to 7th centuries BC. The systematic study of Old Chinese rhymes began in the 17th century, when Gu Yanwu divided the rhyming words of the Shijing into ten groups ( 韻部 yùnbù ). Gu's analysis was refined by Qing dynasty philologists, steadily increasing the number of rhyme groups. One of these scholars, Duan Yucai , stated the important principle that characters in

1824-557: Is the basis of all reproductions in circulation. In the medieval rime dictionaries, characters were organized into rhyme groups ( 韵 yùn ), with 193 groups in the Qieyun , growing to 206 in the Guangyun . The order of the rhyme groups within each tone implies a correspondence between rhyme groups across the four tones . Thus for each rhyme group with an -m, -n or -ng coda in the level tone there are typically corresponding rhyme groups with

1900-453: Is the foundation of the compact tabular presentation of rime dictionary syllables. For example, the dental and retroflex stop initials are combined in a single group in a rime table, with the rows distinguishing the different Qieyun initials, and the three groups of sibilant initials are similarly combined. In a similar fashion different finals may occupy different rows of the same chart. The Guangyun rhyme groups (here illustrated in

1976-425: Is the phonological system of the Qieyun , a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries. These dictionaries set out to codify the pronunciations of characters to be used when reading the classics . They indicated pronunciation using the fanqie method, dividing a syllable into an initial consonant and the rest, called the final. In his Qièyùn kǎo (1842),

2052-574: The Qieyun , with the row of the rime tables in which each combination was placed: The mixed and chongniu finals, though designated as division-III finals, are spread across rows 2 and 4 as well as row 3 of the tables. To handle these cases, a distinction is made between the row that the homophone class is placed in and the "division" of its final. This article distinguishes rows by Arabic numerals 1 2 3 4 and divisions by Roman numerals I II III IV. In addition, division-II and division-IV finals occur only in "outer" shè . This distribution

2128-451: The -j- medial of Middle Chinese was an innovation not present in Old Chinese. He classified Middle Chinese finals without -j- as type A and those with the medial as type B, and suggested that they arose from Old Chinese short and long vowels respectively. André-Georges Haudricourt had demonstrated in 1954 that the tones of Vietnamese were derived from final consonants *-ʔ and *-s in an atonal ancestral language. He also suggested that

2204-487: The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences . Reconstruction of Old Chinese Although the various notations appear to be very different, they correspond with each other on most points. By the 1970s, it was generally agreed that Old Chinese had fewer points of articulation than Middle Chinese , a set of voiceless sonorants , and labiovelar and labio-laryngeal initials. Since the 1990s, most authors have agreed on

2280-526: The Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 12th-century Yunjing ('mirror of rhymes') and Qiyin lüe ('summary of the seven sounds'), which are very similar, and believed to derive from a common prototype. Earlier fragmentary documents describing the analysis have been found at Dunhuang , suggesting that the tradition may date back to

2356-427: The Shijing , *a rhymed with *ă and *â, *ɛ rhymed with *ĕ and *ŭ, *ŭ rhymed with *u, *ô rhymed with *ộ, and *o rhymed with *ǒ and *å. Karlgren projected the final consonants of Middle Chinese, semivowels /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ back onto Old Chinese. He also noted many cases where words in the departing tone rhymed or shared a phonetic element with words ending in

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2432-457: The Tang dynasty , leading to a series of revised and expanded editions, the most important of which was the Guangyun (1008). In these dictionaries, characters were grouped first by the four tones , and then into rhyme groups. Each rhyme group was subdivided into groups of homophonous characters, with the pronunciation of each given by a fanqie formula, a pair of familiar characters indicating

2508-410: The 1990s. Baxter did not produce a dictionary of reconstructions, but the book contains a large number of examples, including all the words occurring in rhymes in the Shijing , and his methods are described in great detail. Schuessler (2007) contains reconstructions of the entire Old Chinese lexicon using a simplified version of Baxter's system. Baxter's treatment of the initials is largely similar to

2584-532: The 36 initials. The 36 initials were so influential that it was not until 1842 that it was discovered (by Chen Li ) that the initials of the Qieyun were slightly different. There is some variation in the transcription of the initials 影 and 喻 . The table above uses ⟨ʔ⟩ and ⟨ʜ⟩ . Other conventions are ⟨ʼ⟩ vs nothing, ⟨ʼ⟩ vs ⟨ʼʼ⟩ , and mid dot ⟨·⟩ vs ⟨ʼ⟩ . These conventions carry over to other scripts of

2660-458: The 36 initials. The Jīng shǐ zhèng yīn Qièyùn zhǐnán ( 經史正音切韻指南 ), produced by Liú Jiàn ( 劉鑑 ) in 1336, was the basis for one of the two sets of rime tables at the front of the Kangxi dictionary . The Yunjing was lost in China for several centuries. The Qieyun zhizhangtu , incorrectly attributed to the 11th century scholar Sima Guang , was believed to be the oldest of the rime tables, and

2736-624: The Cantonese scholar Chen Li performed a systematic analysis of a later redaction of the Qieyun , identifying its initial and final categories, though not the sounds they represented. Scholars have attempted to determine the phonetic content of the various distinctions by comparing them with rhyme tables from the Song dynasty , pronunciations in modern varieties and loans in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese (the Sinoxenic materials), but many details regarding

2812-528: The Chinese departing tone derived from earlier *-s, which acted as a derivational suffix in Old Chinese. Then the departing tone syllables that Karlgren had reconstructed with *-d and *-g could instead be reconstructed as *-ts and *-ks, with the stops subsequently being lost before the final *-s, which eventually became a tonal distinction. The absence of a corresponding labial final could be attributed to early assimilation of *-ps to *-ts . Pulleyblank strengthened

2888-741: The Middle Chinese stage, because they contain distinctions that cannot be derived from the Qieyun system. For example, the following dental initials have been identified in reconstructed proto-Min : Other points of articulation show similar distinctions within stops and nasals. Proto-Min voicing is inferred from the development of Min tones, but the phonetic values of the initials are otherwise uncertain. The sounds indicated as * -t , * -d , etc. are known as "softened stops" due to their reflexes in Jianyang and nearby Min varieties in Fujian , where they appear as fricatives or approximants, or are missing entirely, while

2964-501: The absence or presence of lip rounding (often transcribed as -w- or -u-). Some Guangyun rhyme groups include syllables of both kinds, and thus span two charts, while others are purely "open" or "closed", and thus fit within one chart. Charts are grouped together in broad rhyme classes ( 攝 ; shè ), each characterized as either "inner" ( 內 ; nèi ) or "outer" ( 外 ; wài ), thought to be related to vowel heights, contrasting close vowels and open vowels respectively. For example,

3040-569: The distinctions in modern varieties of Chinese (except Min ), as well as layers of Chinese loanwords, such as the Kan-on layer of Sino-Japanese vocabulary . Each chart of the Yunjing is labelled as either "open" ( 開 ; kāi ) or "closed" ( 合 ; hé ). The corresponding terms in the Qiyin lüe are "heavy" ( 重 ; zhòng ) and "light" ( 輕 ; qīng ). The open/closed distinction is interpreted to indicate

3116-515: The distinctions in the Qieyun would have been meaningless to the compilers. Edwin Pulleyblank has argued that the tables contain enough evidence to reconstruct the speech of that later period. He calls this language Late Middle Chinese (LMC) in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the Qieyun , and argues that it was the standard speech of the imperial capital Chang'an in the late Tang dynasty . His reconstruction accounts for most of

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3192-405: The division-II vowels of Middle Chinese derived from the Old Chinese medial *-l- that Karlgren had proposed to account for phonetic series contacts with l- . Yakhontov also observed that the Middle Chinese semi-vowel -w- had a limited distribution, occurring either after velar or laryngeal initials or before finals -aj , -an or at . He suggested that -w- had two sources, deriving from either

3268-405: The early 20th century Huang Kan observed that only 19 of them occurred with a wide range of finals, implying that the others were in some sense secondary developments. The logographic Chinese writing system does not use symbols for individual sounds as is done in an alphabetic system. However, the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds , in which a word is written by combining

3344-448: The few words where Karlgren had *b, as well as a voiceless counterpart *f. Unlike the above ideas, these have not been adopted by later workers. Pulleyblank also proposed a number of initial consonant clusters, allowing any initial to be preceded by *s- and followed by *-l- (*-r- in later revisions), and grave initials and *n to be followed by *-δ- (*-l- in later revisions). On the basis of transcription evidence, Pulleyblank argued that

3420-564: The finals are still disputed. According to its preface, the Qieyun did not reflect a single contemporary dialect, but incorporated distinctions made in different parts of China at the time (a diasystem ). The fact that the Qieyun system contains more distinctions than any single contemporary form of speech means that it retains additional information about the history of the language. The large number of initials and finals are unevenly distributed, suggesting hypotheses about earlier forms of Chinese. For example, it includes 37 initials, but in

3496-657: The first of the 43 charts of the Yùnjìng is shown below (the Arabic numerals are modern annotations): The five big characters on the right-hand side read Nèi zhuǎn dìyī kāi (內轉第一開). In the Yùnjìng , each chart is called a zhuǎn (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). The columns of each table classify syllables according to their initial consonant ( shēngmǔ 聲母 lit. 'sound mother'), with syllables beginning with

3572-703: The following inventory of initial consonants: Li also included the *-l- medial proposed by Pulleyblank, in most cases re-interpreting it as *-r-. In addition to the medial *-j- projected back from Middle Chinese, he also postulated the combination *-rj-. Assuming that rhyming syllables had the same main vowel, Li proposed a system of four vowels *i , *u , *ə and *a . He also included three diphthongs *iə , *ia and *ua to account for syllables that were placed in rhyme groups reconstructed with *ə or *a but were distinguished in Middle Chinese: Li followed Karlgren in proposing final consonants *-d and *-g, but

3648-430: The following series of initial consonants: To account for the broad variety of vowels in his reconstruction of Middle Chinese, Karlgren also proposed a complex inventory of Old Chinese vowels: He also had a secondary vowel *i, which occurred only in combination with other vowels. As with Middle Chinese, Karlgren viewed his reconstruction as a narrow transcription of the sounds of Old Chinese. Thus *e rhymed with *ĕ in

3724-543: The late Tang dynasty . Some scholars, such as the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren , use the French spelling rime for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme. The Qieyun , produced by Lu Fayan ( 陸法言 ; Lù Fǎyán ) in 601, was a rime dictionary , serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts and an aid in the composition of verse. It quickly became popular during

3800-633: The level tone, except where a group occurs only in the departing tone) are distributed across the 43 charts of the Yunjing and Qiyin lüe as follows: In some cases, the Guangyun already reflected the open/closed distinction with separate rhyme groups, while in others they were included in the same group. The earliest documentary records of the rime table tradition, the Dunhuang fragments, contain lists of 30 initials, each named after an exemplary character. This

3876-612: The lexicon, are the sound system of Middle Chinese (7th century AD), the structure of Chinese characters , and the rhyming patterns of the Classic of Poetry ( Shijing ), dating from the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Several other kinds of evidence are less comprehensive, but provide valuable clues. These include Min dialects, early Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, early loans between Chinese and neighbouring languages, and families of Chinese words that appear to be related. Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese,

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3952-454: The loss of the final stop in checked syllables, giving rise to the departing tone. Other instance of the departing tone arise from word that shifted from the level and rising categories. In a pair of papers published in 1960, the Russian linguist Sergei Yakhontov proposed two revisions to the structure of Old Chinese that are now widely accepted. He proposed that both the retroflex initials and

4028-700: The most commonly used until it was replaced by that of Baxter in the 1990s. Although Li did not produce a complete dictionary of Old Chinese, he presented his methods in sufficient detail that others could apply them to the data. Schuessler (1987) includes reconstructions of the Western Zhou lexicon using Li's system. Li included the labio-velars, labio-laryngeals and voiceless nasals proposed by Pulleyblank. As Middle Chinese g- occurs only in palatal environments, Li attempted to derive both g- and ɣ- from Old Chinese *g- (and similarly *gw- ), but had to assume irregular developments in some cases. Thus he arrived at

4104-402: The most controversial aspect of rime table phonology, but is believed to indicate palatalization (transcribed as the presence or absence of -j- or -i-), retroflex features, phonation , vowel quality (high vs. low or front vs. back) or some combination of these. Other scholars view them not as phonetic categories but formal devices exploiting distributional patterns in the Qieyun to achieve

4180-452: The non-softened variants appear as stops. Evidence from early loans into Mienic languages suggests that the softened stops were prenasalized . Several early texts contain transcriptions of foreign names and terms using Chinese characters for their phonetic values. Of particular importance are the many Buddhist transcriptions of the Eastern Han period, because the native pronunciation of

4256-495: The other derived from dental fricatives *δ and *θ, cognate with Tibeto-Burman *l-. He considered recasting his Old Chinese *l and *δ as *r and *l to match the Tibeto-Burman cognates, but rejected the idea to avoid complicating his account of the evolution of Chinese. Later he re-visited this decision, recasting *δ, *θ, *l and *lh as *l, *hl, *r and *hr respectively. Pulleyblank also proposed an Old Chinese labial fricative *v for

4332-413: The possible medials were *-r-, *-j- and the combination *-rj-. However while Li had proposed *-rj- as conditioning palatalization of velars, Baxter followed Pulleyblank in proposing it as the source of division III chóngniǔ finals. Rhyme table A rime table or rhyme table ( simplified Chinese : 韵图 ; traditional Chinese : 韻圖 ; pinyin : yùntú ; Wade–Giles : yün-t'u )

4408-415: The pronunciation of syllables of these rime dictionaries, and do not contain dictionary-like material such as definitions. Similarly, where a group of characters are recorded as homophones in the rime dictionaries, typically only one will occur in a rime table. A rime table book presents these distinct syllables in a number of tabular charts, each devoted to one or more sets of parallel rhyme groups across

4484-425: The proposals of Pulleyblank and Li. He reconstructed the liquids *l, *hl, *r and *hr in the same contexts as Pulleyblank. Unlike Li, he distinguished Old Chinese *ɦ and *w from *g and *gʷ. Other additions were *z, with a limited distribution, and voiceless and voiced palatals *hj and *j, which he described as "especially tentative, being based largely on scanty graphic evidence". As in Pulleyblank and Li's systems,

4560-640: The reconstruction of early forms of those languages. Many authors have produced their own reconstructions of Old Chinese. A few of the most influential are listed here. The first complete reconstruction of Old Chinese was produced by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in a dictionary of Middle and Old Chinese, the Grammata Serica (1940), revised in 1957 as the Grammata Serica Recensa (GSR). Although Karlgren's Old Chinese reconstructions have been superseded, his comprehensive dictionary remains

4636-514: The rhyme table tradition were not present in the Han period. Many students of Chinese have noted "word families", groups of words with related meanings and variant pronunciations, sometimes written using the same character. One common case is "derivation by tone change", in which words in the departing tone appear to be derived from words in other tones. Another alternation involves transitive verbs with an unvoiced initial and passive or stative verbs with

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4712-439: The rising-toned 董 dǒng , the departing-toned 送 sòng , and the entering-toned 屋 wū (which in Middle Chinese ended in -k, the entering tone counterpart of -ng). Within each tone group are four rows known as děng (等 'class', 'grade' or 'group'), which Bernhard Karlgren translated as "divisions" while other linguists prefer "grades". They are usually denoted by Roman numerals I to IV. Their meaning remains

4788-429: The same coda in the rising and departing tones, and a corresponding rhyme group in the entering tone with a -p, -t or -k coda respectively. In contrast, syllables with vocalic codas typically had corresponding rhyme groups only in the level, rising and departing tones. There were also four departing tone rhyme groups with -j codas that had no counterparts in the other tones. The rime tables were solely concerned with

4864-480: The same phonetic series would be in the same rhyme group, making it possible to assign almost all words to rhyme groups. A final revision by Wang Li in the 1930s produced the standard set of 31 rhyme groups. These were used in all reconstructions up to the 1980s, when Zhengzhang Shangfang , Sergei Starostin and William Baxter independently proposed a more radical splitting into more than 50 rhyme groups. The Min dialects are believed to have split off before

4940-536: The sounds are assumed to have been similar at the time the characters were chosen, such relationships give clues to the lost sounds. The first systematic study of the structure of Chinese characters was Xu Shen 's Shuowen Jiezi (100 AD). The Shuowen was mostly based on the small seal script standardized in the Qin dynasty . Earlier characters from oracle bones and Zhou bronze inscriptions often reveal relationships that were obscured in later forms. Rhyme has been

5016-487: The sounds of the initial and final parts of a syllable respectively. The dictionaries typically used several characters for each initial or final. The fanqie method of indicating pronunciation made the dictionaries awkward to use. The děngyùnxué ( 等韻學 'study of classified rhymes') was a more sophisticated analysis of the Qieyun pronunciations, initially developed by Chinese Buddhist monks who were studying Indian linguistics . A tantalizing glimpse of this tradition

5092-430: The source languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali , is known in detail. Eastern Han commentaries on the classics contain many remarks on the pronunciations of particular words, which has yielded a great deal of information on the pronunciations and even dialectal variation of the period. By studying such glosses, the Qing philologist Qian Daxin discovered that the labio-dental and retroflex stop initials identified in

5168-606: The system within the tables. Later rhyme tables were more elaborate. The Sìshēng děngzǐ ( 四聲等子 ) was probably created during the Northern Song, and explicitly introduced broad rhyme classes ( shè 攝 ), which were previously implicit in the ordering of the tables. The preface of the Qièyùn zhĭzhǎngtú ( 切韻指掌圖 ) is dated 1203, in the Southern Song. In this work the tables are restructured with separate columns for each of

5244-679: The theory with several examples of syllables in the departing tone being used to transcribe foreign words ending in -s into Chinese. He further proposed that the Middle Chinese rising tone derived from *-ʔ, implying that Old Chinese lacked tones. Mei Tsu-lin later supported this theory with evidence from early transcriptions of Sanskrit words, and pointed out that rising tone words end in a glottal stop in some modern Chinese dialects, including Wenzhounese and some Min dialects. The Chinese linguist Li Fang-Kuei published an important new reconstruction in 1971, synthesizing proposals of Yakhontov and Pulleyblank with ideas of his own. His system remained

5320-403: The third row of the tables. Some of these (the "pure" division-III finals) occurred only in that row, while others (the "mixed" finals) could also occur in the second or fourth rows with some initials. Later workers noted that in the so-called chóngniǔ rhyme groups, 支 zhī , 脂 zhī , 祭 jì , 宵 xiāo , 鹽 yán , 侵 qīn , 仙 xiān and 真 zhēn ,

5396-423: The tones. The preface to Qieyun indicates that it represented a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions it recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere. The rime tables were compiled centuries later in the time of a new standard, and many of

5472-634: The works of Yuen Ren Chao , Wang Li and others at Wenzhou's library. In 1954, unable to enter university to study linguistics due to familial reasons, he attended the Beijing University of Geosciences and began geological work in the Beijing area. In his spare time, he continued to develop his own ideas on Old Chinese phonology , particularly the finals and vowel system. In the 1960s and 1970s, he undertook dialect survey work in Wenzhou for Lü Shuxiang until he

5548-432: Was later expanded to a standard set of 36 in the preface of the Yunjing , the major addition being a series of labiodental fricatives split from the labial series: Tables of the Yunjing have only 23 columns, with one group of columns each for labials, coronals and sibilants, with the different types placed in different rows of the tables. Some later tables such as the Qieyun zhizhangtu have 36 columns, one for each of

5624-637: Was sent to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution . During a period when the factory was closed due to a factional battle in the Chinese Communist Party , he began exchanging ideas with Pan Wuyun and Jin Shengrong, and refined his Old Chinese system to a six-vowel system. Essentially the same system was independently developed by William Baxter (building on a proposal by Nicholas Bodman ) and by Sergei Starostin . In 1980, he joined

5700-558: Was unable to clearly separate them from open syllables, and extended them to all rhyme groups but one, for which he proposed a final *-r. He also proposed that labio-velar consonants could occur as final consonants. Thus in Li's system every syllable ended in one of the following consonants: Li marked the rising and departing tones with a suffix *-x or *-h, without specifying how they were realized. William H. Baxter 's monograph A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology displaced Li's reconstruction in

5776-467: Was used in the earliest reconstruction efforts. However, in the 1880s several versions of the Yunjing were discovered in Japan. Comparison with the Qiyin lüe showed that they were based on a common model, of which the other rime tables were later refinements. All recent reconstruction work has been based on the Yunjing . The Fù Sòng Yǒnglù ( 覆宋永禄 ) edition of 1564 is considered the most reliable, and

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