Historical Chinese phonology - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters

Logogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...

, not alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

ic or syllabary

Syllabary

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...

, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

linguistics.

Chinese is documented over a long period of time, with the earliest oracle bone

Oracle bone

Oracle bones are pieces of bone normally from ox scapula or turtle plastron which were used for divination chiefly during the late Shang Dynasty. The bones were first inscribed with divination in oracle bone script by using a bronze pin, and then heated until crack lines appeared in which the...

writings dated to c. 1250 BC. However, since the writing is mostly with logographic characters

Logogram

, which do not directly specify the phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

of the language, reconstruction is in general quite difficult, and depends to a large extent on ancillary sources that more directly document the language's phonology. On the basis of these sources, historical Chinese is divided into the following basic periods:

Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

, broadly from about 1300 BC to the early centuries AD. More narrowly, reconstructed "Old Chinese" is based on the rhymes of early poetry such as the Shijing and the phonological components of Chinese characters, and is assumed to represent the language of c. 1000-700 BC.
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

, broadly from about the 6th century AD through to 12th century AD. More narrowly, reconstructed "Middle Chinese" is usually based on the detailed phonetic evidence of the Qieyun
Qieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

rime dictionary
Rime dictionary
thumb|upright=1.0|A page from Shiyun Hebi , a rime dictionary of the [[Qing Dynasty]]A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates...

from the late 6th century AD.
Modern varieties, from about the 13th century AD to the present. Most modern varieties appear to have split off from a Late Middle Chinese koine of about 1000 AD (although some remnants of earlier periods are still present). The Min varieties, however, had split off already by the first few centuries AD.

Overview

Middle Chinese had a structure much like many modern varieties (especially conservative ones such as Cantonese

Cantonese

Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in south China.Cantonese may also refer to:* Yue Chinese, the Chinese language that includes Cantonese* Cantonese cuisine, the cuisine of Guangdong province...

), with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, three tones, and a syllable structure consisting of initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants. Not counting the glide, no clusters could occur at the beginning or end of a syllable.

Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

, on the other hand, had a significantly different structure. There were no tones, a lesser imbalance between possible initial and final consonants, and a significant number of initial and final clusters. There was a well-developed system of derivational and possibly inflectional morphology, formed using consonants added onto the beginning or end of a syllable. This system is similar to the system reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan and still visible, for example, in the written Tibetan language

Tibetan language

The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...

; it is also largely similar to the system that occurs in the more conservative Mon–Khmer languages, such as modern Khmer

Khmer language

Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...

(Cambodian).

The main changes leading to the modern varieties have been a reduction in the number of consonants and vowels and a corresponding increase in the number of tones (typically through a pan-East-Asiatic tone split that doubled the number of tones while eliminating the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants). This has led to a gradual decrease in the number of possible syllables. In Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin

Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....

, this has progressed to a farther extent than elsewhere, with only about 1,200 possible syllables. The result, in Mandarin especially, has been the proliferation of the number of two-syllable compound words, which have steadily replaced former monosyllabic words, to the extent that the majority of words in Standard Mandarin are now composed of two syllables.

Periodization of Chinese

The terms "Old Chinese" and "Middle Chinese" refer to long periods of time in and of themselves, during which significant changes occurred. Although there is no standard system for subdividing these periods, the following is an approximate chronology leading from the oldest writings in the oracle bone

Oracle bone

script up through modern Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin

Axel Schuessler uses the term Early Zhou Chinese to refer to the language from the earliest records down to the end of the Western Zhou
Western Zhou
The Western Zhōu period was the first half of the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. It began when King Wu of Zhou overthrew the Shang Dynasty at the Battle of Muye. C.H...

period (c. 1250 to 771 BC).
W. A. C. H. Dobson uses the term Early Archaic Chinese to refer to the same period ("10th to 9th century BC"), although Schuessler suggests that the term should refer to a slightly later period.
Dobson uses the term Late Archaic Chinese to refer to the "4th to 3rd century BC", i.e. the period near the beginning of the Han Dynasty
Han Dynasty
The Han Dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin Dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms . It was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han. It was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang...

.
Late Han Chinese (LHC) is c. 200 AD. This is around the time that the Min Chinese languages diverged from the others.
Old Northwest Chinese (ONWC), c. 400 AD, is a reconstruction by Weldon South Coblin
Weldon South Coblin
Weldon South Coblin is a linguist and sinologist. He was a student of Li Fang-Kuei. Early in his career he made many important contributions to Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman linguistics, but since the mid 1990s has worked primarily on alphabetic representations of Chinese...

of the language of the northwestern Chinese provinces of Gansu
Gansu
' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.It lies between the Tibetan and Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east...

and Shaanxi
Shaanxi
' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...

that is immediately ancestral to a set of northwestern dialects documented by various early Tang dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...

authors.
Early Middle Chinese (EMC), c. 600 AD, is the language of the Qieyun
Qieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

rime dictionary
Rime dictionary
thumb|upright=1.0|A page from Shiyun Hebi , a rime dictionary of the [[Qing Dynasty]]A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates...

, the first stage for which we have direct and detailed phonetic evidence. This evidence is not enough by itself to directly determine the sound system of the language, however, as it only subdivides characters into an initial consonant and non-initial portion, without further decomposing the latter into phonemes.
Late Middle Chinese (LMC), c. 1000 AD, is the native language of the authors of the Yunjing
Yunjing
The Yunjing is the oldest existing Chinese rime table. Current versions of the Yunjing date back to the 1161 and 1203 editions published by Zhang Linzhi ....

rime table
Rime table
A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fǎnqiè analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries...

and the oldest stage that can be reconstructed from modern non-Min varieties by the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...

.
Early Mandarin, c. 1300 AD (sometimes specifically given as 1269-1455), is the language of the 'Phags-pa script, the first native script that directly encodes phonology. It is also documented in the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韻 "Sounds and Rhymes of the Central Plains", an opera manual of 1324 AD written by Zhou Deqing).
Middle Mandarin, up through c. 1800 (sometimes specifically given as 1455-1795), documented in numerous Chinese, Korean and European sources. Among these are Chinese-Korean pedagogical texts such as Hongmu Chôngyun Yôkhun (1455) and Sasông T’onghae (1517); the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary (1583–1588) of the Christian missionary Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci, SJ was an Italian Jesuit priest, and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China Mission, as it existed in the 17th-18th centuries. His current title is Servant of God....

; and Chinese rhyme manuals such as the Yunlue Huitong (1642).
Modern Standard Mandarin
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....

, a standardized form of the dialect of Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

that is little changed from the 19th century.

Chinese native phonological traditions

A native tradition of Chinese phonology developed in the Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

period. Chinese linguists had long compiled dictionaries and attempted to identify the pronunciation of difficult characters by specifying homophone

Homophone

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...

characters. During the early centuries AD, however, the more advanced method of fanqie

Fanqiè

In Chinese phonology, fanqie is a method to indicate the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters.-The Origin:...

was developed, which allowed the pronunciation of any syllable to be specified unambiguously by using one character to indicate the initial consonant and another to indicate the remainder. By the sixth century AD, systematic attempts were made to compile lists of all characters and specify their pronunciation by way of fanqie, culminating in rime dictionaries

Rime dictionary

thumb|upright=1.0|A page from Shiyun Hebi , a rime dictionary of the [[Qing Dynasty]]A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates...

such as the Qieyun

Qieyun

The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

(601 AD).

During the next few centuries, the increasing influence of Buddhism and Buddhist scholars brought Chinese linguists in touch with the tradition of Sanskrit grammar

Sanskrit grammar

The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period , culminating in the Pāṇinian grammar of the 4th century BC.-Grammatical tradition:The...

, which included a highly advanced understanding of phonology

Phonology

and phonetics

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

, including a system of analyzing sounds by distinctive feature

Distinctive feature

In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features,...

s, such as place of articulation

Place of articulation

In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...

and type of phonation

Phonation

Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology...

. This led to rime table

Rime table

A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fǎnqiè analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries...

s such as the Yunjing

Yunjing

The Yunjing is the oldest existing Chinese rime table. Current versions of the Yunjing date back to the 1161 and 1203 editions published by Zhang Linzhi ....

(c. 1150 AD), a sophisticated analysis of the sound system of the Qieyun

Qieyun

.

During the Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....

(1644–1912), scholars such as Duan Yucai

Duan Yucai

Duan Yucai , courtesy name Ruoying was a Chinese philologist of the Qing Dynasty. He made great contributions to the study of Historical Chinese phonology, and is known for his annotated edition of Shuowen Jiezi.-Biography:...

diligently studied the sound system of Middle

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

and Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

. Through careful examination of rime table

Rime table

A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fǎnqiè analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries...

s, rime dictionaries

Rime dictionary

and patterns of rhyming among poets of various eras, these scholars were able to work out the system of categories of rhymes in Old Chinese, and discover additional Middle Chinese categories that had previously been overlooked. However, progress in Chinese linguistics was seriously hampered by the lack of any concept of a phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

— i.e. a basic unit of sound, including vowels and vowel-like segments as well as consonants. This made it impossible to go beyond determination of systems of rhyming categories to reconstruction of the actual sounds involved.

In some ways, the lack of native Chinese development of the concept of a unit of sound is surprising, as it had already been developed by Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini by the 4th century BC at the latest, and the phonological analysis of the Yunjing

Yunjing

The Yunjing is the oldest existing Chinese rime table. Current versions of the Yunjing date back to the 1161 and 1203 editions published by Zhang Linzhi ....

shows a close familiarity with the tradition of Sanskrit grammar. Furthermore, some non-Chinese writing systems within the Chinese cultural orbit, such as the Korean script and especially the Tibetan script

Tibetan script

The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday...

, were developed under the close influence of Indian writing systems and have the concept of phoneme directly embedded in them. (Furthermore, the 'Phags-pa script, an alphabetic script of Tibetan origin, had been used to write Chinese itself during the Mongolian Yuan dynasty

Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...

, c. 1270-1360, although it later fell out of use.) It seems likely, however, that

The strong influence and long tradition of Chinese writing, which included no concept of an alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

and always treated the rhyming part of a syllable as a single unit, made it difficult to independently develop the concept of a unit of sound.
Lack of knowledge of Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

by most Chinese scholars precluded direct reading of the original works on Sanskrit grammar.
Cultural attitudes that treated Koreans, Tibetans, Mongolians and most other foreigners as "barbarians" made it difficult for scientific knowledge from these cultures to diffuse into China.

Modern methods of reconstruction

As a result, the first reconstructions of the actual sound systems of Old and Middle Chinese were only done in the early 20th century, by Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

sinologist Bernhard Karlgren

Bernhard Karlgren

Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods...

. Armed with his knowledge of Western historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

, he performed field work in China between 1910 and 1912, creating a list of 3,100 Chinese characters and collecting phonological data on the pronunciation of these characters in 19 Mandarin dialects as well as the dialects of Shanghai

Shanghai

Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...

(Wu), Fuzhou

Fuzhou

Fuzhou is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian Province, People's Republic of China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute the Mindong linguistic and cultural area....

(Eastern Min), and Guangdong

Guangdong

Guangdong is a province on the South China Sea coast of the People's Republic of China. The province was previously often written with the alternative English name Kwangtung Province...

(Cantonese

Cantonese

Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in south China.Cantonese may also refer to:* Yue Chinese, the Chinese language that includes Cantonese* Cantonese cuisine, the cuisine of Guangdong province...

). He combined this with the Sino-Japanese and Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations as well as previously published material on 9 other dialects, along with the fanqie
Fanqiè
In Chinese phonology, fanqie is a method to indicate the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters.-The Origin:...

analysis of the Guangyun

Guangyun

The Guangyun is a Chinese rime dictionary that was compiled from 1007 to 1008 under the auspices of Emperor Zhenzong of Song. Chen Pengnian and Qiu Yong were the chief editors....

rime dictionary

Rime dictionary

(a later version of the Qieyun

Qieyun

of 601 AD). In 1915, he published his reconstruction of Middle Chinese, which underlies in one form or another all subsequent reconstructions. Walter Simon

Walter Simon

Ernest Julius Walter Simon CBE FBA was a sinologist and librarian. He was born in Berlin and lived there, being educated at the University of Berlin, until he fled the Nazis to London in 1934, where he spent all the rest of his life except for brief periods as a visiting professor in various...

and Henri Maspero

Henri Maspero

Henri Maspero was a French sinologist, today particularly remembered for his pioneering works on Taoism.-Biography:...

also made great contributions in the field during the early days of its development. Karlgren himself had no direct access to the Qieyun

Qieyun

, which was thought lost; however, fragments of the Qieyun
Qieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

were discovered in the Dunhuang

Dunhuang

Dunhuang is a city in northwestern Gansu province, Western China. It was a major stop on the ancient Silk Road. It was also known at times as Shāzhōu , or 'City of Sands', a name still used today...

Caves in the 1930s, and a nearly complete copy was discovered in 1947 in the Palace Museum.

Karlgren was also instrumental in early reconstruction of Old Chinese. His early work on Middle Chinese made various suggestions about Old Chinese, and a detailed reconstruction appeared in Grammata Serica (1940), a dictionary of Middle and Old Chinese reconstructions. An expanded version, Grammata Serica Recensa
Grammata Serica Recensa
The Grammata Serica Recensa is a dictionary of Old Chinese published by the Swedish sinologist Bernard Karlgren in 1957.Bernard Karlgren made fundamental contributions to the study of the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese, which he called Ancient and Archaic Chinese respectively.In the course of...

, was published in 1957 and is still a commonly-cited source.

The reconstruction of Middle Chinese draws its data (in approximate order of importance) from:

Rime dictionaries
Rime dictionary
thumb|upright=1.0|A page from Shiyun Hebi , a rime dictionary of the [[Qing Dynasty]]A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates...

and rime tables of the Middle Chinese era, such as the Qieyun
Qieyun
The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

(601 AD) and Yunjing
Yunjing
The Yunjing is the oldest existing Chinese rime table. Current versions of the Yunjing date back to the 1161 and 1203 editions published by Zhang Linzhi ....

(c. 1150 AD).
Modern Chinese speaking variants such as Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin, Min, Wu etc.
Sino-Xenic data — Chinese loanwords borrowed in large numbers into Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

and Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

, especially during the period of 500-1000 AD. This large-scale borrowing led to the so-called Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean vocabularies of these languages.
Other early cases of Chinese words borrowed into foreign languages or transcribed in foreign sources, e.g. Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

works in India.
Early cases of transliteration of foreign words
Transliteration into Chinese characters
In Chinese, transcription is known as yīnyì or yìmíng . While it is common to see foreign names left in their original forms in a Chinese text, it is also common to transcribe foreign proper nouns into Chinese characters....

from other languages such as Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...

and Tibetan
Tibetan language
The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...

into Chinese.
Chinese written in the 'Phags-pa script, a brief period (c. 1270-1360) when Chinese was written in an alphabetic script.
Transcriptions of Chinese by foreigners, especially the Hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...

transcriptions of Koreans such as Sin Sukchu (15th century) and works by various Christian missionaries and other Westerners, the oldest of which is Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci, SJ was an Italian Jesuit priest, and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China Mission, as it existed in the 17th-18th centuries. His current title is Servant of God....

's Portuguese-Chinese dictionary of 1583-1588. (Although these transcriptions, as well as the 'Phags-pa evidence, are significant in providing extensive documentation of earlier forms of Mandarin Chinese, their importance for reconstructing Middle Chinese pales in comparison with the much greater breadth provided by the pronunciation of Chinese variants and Sino-Xenic languages, despite their later attestation.)

Karlgren suggested that the Middle Chinese documented in the Qieyun was a live language of the Sui

Sui Dynasty

The Sui Dynasty was a powerful, but short-lived Imperial Chinese dynasty. Preceded by the Southern and Northern Dynasties, it ended nearly four centuries of division between rival regimes. It was followed by the Tang Dynasty....

-Tang

Tang Dynasty

The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...

period. Today, with direct access to the Qieyun, this notion has been replaced by the view that the sound system in Qieyun represents (or proposes) a literate reading adopted by the literate class of the period throughout the country, not any live language that once existed. For example, in some cases a former three-way distinction A, B, C among initials or finals gave way to a situation where one dialect group of the Qieyun period merged AB vs. C, while another group merged A vs. BC. In these cases, the Qieyun specifies A, B, C as all distinct, even though no living dialect of the time period made such a three-way distinction, and any earlier dialect that did make this distinction would have differed in other ways from the Qieyun system.

The reconstruction of Old Chinese is more controversial than that of Middle Chinese since it has to be extrapolated from the Middle Chinese data. Phonological information concerning Old Chinese are chiefly gained from:

The rhymed texts written before the Qin Dynasty
Qin Dynasty
The Qin Dynasty was the first imperial dynasty of China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The Qin state derived its name from its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Shaanxi. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the 4th century BC, during the Warring...

, chiefly Shijing
Shi Jing
The Classic of Poetry , translated variously as the Book of Songs, the Book of Odes, and often known simply as its original name The Odes, is the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs. It comprises 305 poems and songs, with many range from the 10th to the 7th centuries BC...

, the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry.
The fact that characters sharing the same phonetic component were homophones or near-homophones when the characters were first created.
Comparison of Old Chinese with other Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...

dialects.

From Old Chinese to Early Middle Chinese

There are disagreements over exactly what the Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

(OC) syllable looked like. The following is an approximate consensus, based on the system of William Baxter

William Baxter

William Baxter may refer to:* William Baxter , physician and politician in Nova Scotia* William Baxter , English botanist who collected in Australia...

and (earlier) Li Fang-Kuei:

A syllable consisted of an initial consonant, an optional medial glide /r/ (but no /j/ or /w/), a main vowel, an optional final (coda) consonant, and an optional post-final consonant /s/ or /ʔ/. There were also various pre-initial consonants. (In recent systems, Baxter also constructs a distinction between "tightly bound" pre-initials /C-/ and "loosely bound" pre-initials /Cə/. The tightly-bound pre-initials interact in complex ways with the initial to produce EMC initials, but the loosely-bound pre-initials mostly just disappear. Their presence, however, is revealed by the use of a "phonetic complement" with the corresponding tightly-bound pre-initial in their character, and sometimes by early borrowings into other languages, especially Hmong–Mien languages and Tai languages
Tai languages
The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages are a branch of the Tai–Kadai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including standard Thai or Siamese, the national language of Thailand; Lao or Laotian, the national language of Laos; Burma's Shan language;...

.) Pre-initial and post-final consonants were frequently used in morphological derivation.
There was no MC-style tone, but there was a distinction of some sort between type-A and type-B syllables. Depending on the linguist, the distinction is variously thought to reflect either presence or absence of prefixes, an accentual or length distinction on the main vowel, or some sort of register distinction (e.g. pharyngealization of the initial consonant in type-A syllables). These different reconstructions may not be mutually exclusive (e.g. an earlier prefix distinction may have developed into a later register distinction).
Compared with EMC, there were no palatal or retroflex consonants, but there were labiovelar consonants (e.g. /kʷ/). Baxter also reconstructs voiceless resonants, e.g. /hm/, /hn/.
There were on the order of six main vowels: /a/, /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/, /ə/ (or /ɨ/).
The system of final (coda) consonants was similar to EMC; however, there was no /wŋ/. Baxter also reconstructs final /r/, later becoming /n/.

The following are the main developments that produced Early Middle Chinese (EMC) from Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

(OC):

Complex changes occurred involving initial clusters and voiceless resonants.
Type-B syllables developed a /j/ glide. This glide combined with a previous coronal consonant to produce new palatal consonants. It also sometimes turned a preceding velar or laryngeal into a palatal sibilant and/or raised a following main vowel. (Contrarily, type-A syllables often lowered a following main vowel, with a high vowel diphthongizing, e.g. /i/ becoming /ej/.)
The /r/ glide eventually disappeared, but before doing this it turned a previous coronal consonant into a retroflex consonant, and fronted (and often centralized) a following main vowel.
Changes to final consonants: /r/ became /n/; /j/ dropped after /a/; /k/ dropped before /s/; /t/ before /s/ became /j/ (which remained, even after /a/).
Tones developed from the former suffixes (post-final consonants), with MC tone 2 developing from /s/, tone 3 developing from /ʔ/, and tone 1 from other syllables. As the suffixes were part of the derivational morphology of OC, this often produced MC tonal variation, either in a single word or in semantically-related words.
Back vowels /o/ and /u/, when followed by a coronal consonant (/j/, /n/, /r/, /t/), broke into /w/ plus a front vowel.
Labiovelar initials were reanalyzed as a velar followed a /w/ glide, which merged with /w/ from breaking of /o/ and /u/.
The main vowel developed in various complicated ways, depending on the surrounding sounds. For example, in type-A syllables, according to Baxter's reconstruction, OC /ɨj/ became /-ɛj/ after /r/; otherwise, /-ej/ after coronal initials, /-oj/ after velar initials, and /-woj/ after labial initials. In type-B syllables, however, OC /ɨj/ became /-ij/ after /r/ or coronal initial, but /-jɨj/ otherwise.

Note that OC type-B syllables correspond closely to division-III, and (in Baxter's reconstruction at least) to EMC syllables with /i/ or /j/.

From Early Middle Chinese to Late Middle Chinese

To a large degree, Late Middle Chinese (LMC) of c. 1000 AD can be viewed as the direct ancestor of all Chinese varieties except Min Chinese; in other words, attempting to reconstruct the parent language of all varieties excluding Min leads no farther back than LMC. See below for more information.

Exactly which changes occurred between EMC and LMC depends on whose system of EMC and/or LMC reconstruction is used. In the following, Baxter's EMC reconstruction is compared to Pulleyblank's LMC reconstruction. To the extent that these two systems reflect reality, they may be significantly farther apart than the 400 or so years normally given between EMC and LMC, since Baxter's EMC system was designed to harmonize with Old Chinese while Pulleyblank's LMC system was designed to harmonize with later Mandarin developments. Furthermore, Baxter considers all the distinctions of the Qieyun to be real, while many of them are clearly anachronisms that no longer applied to any living form of the language in 600 AD. Finally, some of the resulting "changes" may not be actual changes at all so much as conceptual differences in the way the systems have been reconstructed; these are noted below.

Changes mostly involve initials, medials, and main vowels.

The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme /r/.
A new class of labiodentals emerges, from EMC labials followed by /j/ and an EMC back vowel.
EMC complex medial /jw/ becomes /y/ [ɥ], producing a six-way medial distinction between none, /i/, /ji/, /w/, /y/, /jy/. The phonemic glides /i/ and /y/ are vocalic [i] and [y] before short vowels /a/ and /ə/, but semivocalic [j] and [ɥ] before long vowel /a:/.
The eight-way EMC distinction in main vowels is significantly modified, developing into a system with high vowels /i/, /y/, /u/ and (marginally) /ɨ/, and non-high vowels /a/, /ə/, /a:/. However, this is best analyzed as a system with a four-way main vowel distinction between no vowel and the three phonemic vowels /a/, /ə/, /a:/; high vowels are then analyzed as phonemically consisting of a medial and no main vowel (/ɨ/ is phonemically a syllable containing only a bare consonant, with no medial and no main vowel).
High front medials/main vowels /i/ and /y/ are lost after EMC retroflex sibilants, prior to merging with palatals; contrarily, a /j/ sometimes appears after guttural consonants.

Few changes to final consonants occur; the main ones are the loss of /j/ after a high vowel, the disappearance of /ɨ/ (which might or might not be reckoned as a final consonant) in the rhyme /-ɛɨ/, and (potentially) the appearance of /jŋ/ and /jk/ (which are suspect in various ways; see below).

The tones do not change phonemically. However, allophonically they evidently split into a higher-pitched allophone in syllables with voiced initials, and a lower-pitched allophone in syllables with unvoiced initials. All modern Chinese varieties reflect such a split, which produces a new set of phonemic tones in most varieties due to later loss of voicing distinctions.

The following changes are in approximate order.

Labiodentalization

Early Middle Chinese (EMC) labials (/p, ph, b, m/) become Late Middle Chinese (LMC) labiodentals (/f, f, v, mv/) in certain circumstances involving a following glide. When this happens, the glide disappears and /p/ and /ph/ merge info /f/. Using Baxter's reconstruction, the triggering circumstances can be expressed simply as whenever a labial is followed by a glide /j/ and the main vowel is a back vowel; other reconstructions word the rule differently.

Vowel changes and mergers

In approximate order:

a. Some early changes:

/-e-/ (without medial /j/) becomes /-jie-/ after labial and guttural consonants, /-ie-/ elsewhere. (Along with certain later changes, this means that, synchronically, an LMC speaker cannot distinguish original Division IV syllables from original III-4 chongniu
Chongniu
Chóngniǔ or rime doublets are pairs of Middle Chinese homophone groups within the same rime group in rime dictionaries such as the Qieyun and Guangyun that are divided between the third and fourth divisions of rime tables such as the Yunjing but not distinguished in any other way.The name comes...

syllables; likewise for Division III vs. III-3 chongniu. This explains why these chongniu pairs end up in grades 3 and 4, respectively.) A change of this sort occurs in all modern reconstructions of EMC and LMC, and is responsible for the creation of Division IV.
/ŋ/ and /k/ after a non-high front vowel (/æ/, /ɛ/, /e/) become /jŋ/ and /jk/ (often viewed as palatalized final consonants). This may not be a real change; Pulleyblank's EMC system already includes /jŋ/ and /jk/, whereas they are not present in any modern dialect. The most direct evidence for these sounds comes from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, which was borrowed from LMC and does reflect the sounds. In Pulleyblank's LMC system, /jŋ/ only occurs in the rhymes /-a:jŋ/ and /-iaŋ/, which contrast with /-aŋ/ and /-iaŋ/; likewise for /-jk/. (/-a-/ and /-a:-/ do not contrast before velar finals, except possibly after EMC retroflex sibilants.) These contrasts would be reflected in some other way in a system without /-jŋ/ and /-jk/.
The sequence /-ɛɨ/ merges into /-ɛj/. In some dialects, however, it instead remains separate (perhaps in the form /-ɛ/, not otherwise occurring in Baxter's system). According to Abraham Y.S. Chan, the former change was characteristic of the Luoyang
Luoyang
Luoyang is a prefecture-level city in western Henan province of Central China. It borders the provincial capital of Zhengzhou to the east, Pingdingshan to the southeast, Nanyang to the south, Sanmenxia to the west, Jiyuan to the north, and Jiaozuo to the northeast.Situated on the central plain of...

dialect, while the latter reflected the Jinling dialect. The distinction between the two surfaces in Standard Mandarin as a respective distinction between ai and ya, or pai/pei and pa.

b. Mergers of high-front finals:

EMC finals /je/, /ij/, /i/, /jɨj/ merge into /i/; likewise /jɨ-/ (which occurs before /n/ and /t/) becomes /i-/.
The hekou equivalents of the above (with additional medial /w/) become /yj/.
The III-4 chongniu equivalents of both of the above become /ji/ and /jyj/, respectively.

c. Changes involving high(ish) back vowels, mostly generating /ə/:

EMC final /u/ becomes /uə/; likewise, /ju/ becomes /juə/. (Possibly not a real change.)
The EMC sequence /-uw-/ becomes /-əw-/, and /-jow-/ becomes /-yw-/.
All remaining /-o-/, except in the sequences /-oj/ and /-om/, become /ə/.
All non-final /-jə-/ become /-i-/, and /-wə-/ become /-u-/.

d. Changes involving non-high vowels:

When there is no medial /j/, remaining /-æ-/ and /-ɛ-/ become /-a:-/.
All remaining /-æ-/, /-e-/, /-ɛ-/, /-o-/ become /-a-/.

e. Changes involving medials:

Non-final /-jwi-/ and /-wji-/ become /-jy-/, while /-jw-, wj-, -wi-, -ju-/ become /-y-/.
The medials /-i-/ and /-j-/ merge into a single phoneme, with /-i-/ occurring before /-a-/ and /-ə-/, and /-j-/ elsewhere (before /-a:-/ and high vowels). Medial /-u-/ and /-w-/ merge in the same way.

f. Medial and similar changes triggered by specific initials:

/j/ appears between a guttural consonant (velar or larnygeal) and a directly following /-a:-/. This sets the stage for palatalized syllables in Standard Mandarin such as jia and xian.
A final /i/ directly following a dental sibilant becomes /ɨ/ (presumably [ẓ]).
After an EMC retroflex sibilant, a directly-following high-front vowel or glide (/i/ or /j/, along with front-rounded /y/ or /ɥ/, if reconstructed) is removed, specifically:
1. A glide /j/ is lost.
2. A main vowel /i/ becomes /ə/ if non-final.
3. A main vowel /i/ becomes /ɨ/ (presumably [ṛ]) if final.
4. If high front-rounded vocalics are reconstructed, they unround (/y/ -> /u/, /ɥ/ -> /j/).

Late changes to initial consonants

EMC palatals become retroflex, with palatal sibilants merging with retroflex sibilants and palatal /ɲ/ becoming a new phoneme /r/ (still reflected as such in Standard Mandarin).
Voiced consonants are thought to have become breathy voice
Breathy voice
Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...

d. This is a non-phonemic change; it is postulated to account for the breathy-voiced consonants still present in Wu Chinese, and the common outcome elsewhere of originally voiced consonants as unvoiced aspirates. Karlgren reconstructed breathy voicing for EMC as well, but this is no longer thought to be the case due to lack of any evidence for it in borrowings to or from EMC (especially involving Sanskrit and Middle Indic languages, which had a distinction between normally voiced and breathy-voiced consonants). This may have occurred to differing extents in different places:
- Among the two Chinese varieties that have not merged voiced and unvoiced consonants, Wu reflects the EMC voiced consonants as breathy voiced, but Old Xiang reflects them as normally voiced.
- Gan and Hakka reflect all EMC voiced consonants as unvoiced aspirates, but many others (e.g. Mandarin) only have such aspirated consonants in syllables with EMC tone 1.

Initials

EMC	LMC	Standard Mandarin
/ʔ/	/ʔ/	dropped
ng /ŋ/	/ŋ/	dropped
ny /ɲ/	/r/	r
nr /ɳ/	/ɳ/	n
l	l	l
labials (p,ph,b,m)	same	labial (p,b,m)
labials (p,ph,b,m)	labiodental (f,v,mv) before /j/ + back vowel	f,w
velar (k,kh,g,x,h)	same	velar (k,g,h)
velar (k,kh,g,x,h)	same	palatal (j,q,x) before /i/ or /y/
alveolar sibilant (ts,tsh,dz,s,z)	same	alveolar sibilant (z,c,s)
alveolar sibilant (ts,tsh,dz,s,z)	same	palatal (j,q,x) before /i/ or /y/
alveolar stop (t,th,d)	same	alveolar stop (t,d)
palatal sibilant (tsy,tsyh,dy,sy,zy)	retroflex sibilant	retroflex sibilant (zh,ch,sh)
retroflex sibilant (tsr,tsrh,dr,sr,zr)	retroflex sibilant
retroflex stop (tr,trh,dr)	retroflex stop

More specifically:

EMC/LMC voiced stops and fricatives become unvoiced in Mandarin; stops in syllables with tone 1 become aspirated, otherwise unaspirated.
EMC palatal sibilants and retroflex stops become Mandarin retroflex sibilants.
EMC nasal changes: nr- becomes Mandarin n-; ny- becomes Mandarin r-, or sometimes the syllable er; ng- is dropped.
EMC guttural /ʔ-/ is dropped, and h- is dropped in the sequence hj-.
Before an LMC high front vowel or glide (/i,j/ or /y/), EMC velars and alveolar sibilants become Mandarin palatal sibilants.
Before /j/ + back vowel, EMC labial stops become LMC labiodentals; LMC /f/ and /v/ become Mandarin f-, and LMC /mv/ (sometimes notated differently) becomes Mandarin w-.

Finals

In general, Mandarin preserves the LMC system of medials and main vowels fairly well (better than most other varieties) but drastically reduces the system of codas (final consonants). The systematic changes to medials and main vowels are loss of the chongniu distinctions i/ji and y/jy (which occur in all modern varieties) and loss of the distinction between /a/ and /a:/. All final stop consonants are lost, and final nasals are reduced to a distinction between /n/ and /ŋ/.

The exact changes involving finals are somewhat complex and not always predictable, in that in many circumstances there are multiple possible outcomes. The following is a basic summary; more information can be found in the table of EMC finals in Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

.

Changes to medials:

LMC medial classes /ji/ and /i/ merge, losing the /j/; likewise for /jy/ and /y/.
LMC front medials /i/ and /y/ (and corresponding main vowels) are lost after retroflex consonants. The operation of this change is exactly as for the similar change that occurred after EMC retroflexes. (Note that the difference between EMC retroflex and palatal sibilants is sometimes reflected in the Mandarin difference between e.g. she (EMC retroflex) and shi (EMC palatal).
LMC medial /u/ is lost after labials, and /y/ unrounds to /i/.
LMC medial /u/ is sometimes lost after /l/ and /n/.
Various other changes occur after particular initials.

Changes to main vowels:

Long vowel /a:/ shortens.
Various other complex changes; see Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

.

Changes to codas:

LMC coda /m/ becomes /n/.
LMC stop codas /p,t,k/ are dropped, with /k/ sometimes becoming /j/.
LMC complex codas /wŋ/ and /wk/ become simple codas; likewise for /jŋ/ and /jk/, but often with effects on the preceding vowel.

Tones

A tone split occurs as a result of the loss of the voicing distinction in initial consonants. The split tones then merge back together except for Middle Chinese tone 1; hence Middle Chinese tones 1,2,3 become Mandarin tones 1,2,3,4. (Some syllables with original Mandarin tone 3 move to tone 4; see below.) Syllables with a final stop consonant, originally toneless, get assigned to one of the four modern tones; for syllables with Middle Chinese unvoiced initials, this happens in a completely random fashion.

The specific relationship between Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...

and modern tones:

V- = unvoiced

Phonation

initial consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

L = sonorant

Sonorant

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; fricatives and plosives are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like and . Other consonants, like or , restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and...

initial consonant

V+ = voiced

Phonation

initial consonant (not sonorant

Sonorant

)

Middle Chinese Middle Chinese Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...	Tone Four tones The four tones of Chinese phonology are four traditional tone-classes of words derived from the four phonemic tones of Middle Chinese. They are even level , rising , going departing , and entering checked .-Names:In Middle Chinese, each of the tone names carries the tone it identifies: 平 even ,...	Ping (平)			Shang (上)			Qu (去)			Ru (入)
	Initial	V-	L	V+	V-	L	V+	V-	L	V+	V-	L	V+
Standard Chinese	Tone name	Yin Ping (陰平, 1)	Yang Ping (陽平, 2)		Shang (上, 3)		Qu (去, 4)				redistributed with no pattern	to Qu	to Yang Ping
Standard Chinese	Tone Tone (linguistics) Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called... contour	55	35		214		51				redistributed with no pattern	to 51	to 35

It is known that if the two morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

s of a compound word cannot be ordered by grammar, the order of the two is usually determined by tones — Yin Ping (1), Yang Ping (2), Shang (3), Qu (4), and Ru, which is the plosive-ending tone that has already disappeared. Below are some compound words that show this rule. Tones are shown in parentheses, and R indicates Ru.

左右 (34)
南北 (2R)
輕重 (14)
貧富 (24)
凹凸 (1R)
喜怒 (34)
哀樂 (1R)
生死 (13)
死活 (3R)
陰陽 (12)
明暗 (24)
毀譽 (34)
褒貶 (13)
離合 (2R)

Branching-off of the modern varieties

Most modern varieties can be viewed as descendants of Late Middle Chinese (LMC) of c. 1000 AD. For example, all modern varieties other than Min Chinese have labiodental fricatives (e.g. /f/), a change that occurred after Early Middle Chinese (EMC) of c. 600 AD. In fact, some post-LMC changes are reflected in all modern varieties, such as the loss of the chongniu distinction (between e.g. /pian/ and /pjian/, using Edwin Pulleyblank's transcription). Other changes occurring in most modern varieties, such as the loss of initial voiced obstruents and corresponding tone split, are areal changes that spread across existing dialects; possibly the loss of chongniu distinctions can be viewed in the same way.

Min Chinese, on the other hand, is known to have branched off even before Early Middle Chinese (EMC) of c. 600 AD. Not only does it not reflect the development of labiodental fricatives or other LMC-specific changes, but a number of features already present in EMC appear never developed. An example is the series of retroflex stops in EMC, which developed from earlier alveolar stops followed by /r/, and which later merged with retroflex sibilants. In Min, the corresponding words still have alveolar stops. This difference can be seen in the words for "tea" borrowed into various other languages: For example, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

te, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

tea
Tea
Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world...

vs. Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

cha, English

English language

chai, reflecting the Amoy (Southern Min) /the/ vs. Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin

/tʂha/.

In the case of distinctions that appear to have never developed in Min, it could be argued that the ancestral language did in fact have these distinctions, but they later disappeared. For example, it could be argued that Min varieties descend from a Middle Chinese dialect where retroflex stops merged back into alveolar stops instead of merging with retroflex sibilants. However, this argument cannot be made if there are distinctions in Min that do not appear in EMC, and this does indeed appear to be the case. In particular, Proto-Min (the reconstructed ancestor of the Min varieties) appears to have had six series of stops corresponding to the three series (unvoiced, unvoiced aspirated, voiced) of Middle Chinese. The additional three series are voiced aspirated (or breathy voice

Breathy voice

Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...

d), unvoiced "softened", and voiced "softened".

Evidence for the voiced aspirated stops comes from tonal distinctions among the stops. When voiced stops became unvoiced in most varieties and triggered a tone split, words with these stops moved into new lowered (so-called yang) tone classes, while words with unvoiced stops appeared in raised (so-called yin) tone classes. The result is that the yin classes have words with both aspirated and unaspirated stops, while the yang classes have only one of the two, depending on how the formerly voiced stops developed. Min varieties, however, have both kinds of words in yang classes as well as yin classes. This has caused scholars to reconstruct voiced aspirates (probably realized as breathy voice

Breathy voice

d consonants) in Proto-Min, which develop into unvoiced aspirates in yang-class words.

In addition, in some Min varieties, some words with EMC stops are reflected with stops while others are reflected with "softened" consonants, typically voiced fricatives or approximants. Such "softened stops" occur in both yin and yang classes, suggesting that proto-Min had both unvoiced and voiced "softened stops". Presumably "softened stops" were actually fricatives of some sort, but it is unclear exactly what they were.

Scholars generally assume that these additional proto-Min sounds reflect distinctions in Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

that vanished in Early Middle Chinese but remained in proto-Min. Until recently, no reconstructions of Old Chinese specifically accounted for the proto-Min distinctions, but the recent reconstruction of William Baxter

William Baxter

William Baxter may refer to:* William Baxter , physician and politician in Nova Scotia* William Baxter , English botanist who collected in Australia...

and Laurent Sagart

Laurent Sagart

Laurent Sagart is a director of research at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique . Born at Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Paris 7 and his Doctorat d'Etat in 1990 at University of...

accounts for both voiced aspirates and softened stops. According to them, voiced aspirates reflect Old Chinese stops in words with particular consonant prefixes, while softened stops reflect Old Chinese stops in words with a minor syllable

Minor syllable

Minor syllable is a term used primarily in the description of Mon-Khmer languages, where a word typically consists of a reduced syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable...

prefix, so that the stop occurred between vowels. The postulated development of the softened stops is very similar to the development of voiced fricatives in Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

, which likewise occur in both yin and yang varieties and are reconstructed as developing from words with minor syllables.

External links

Chinese Phonological History, Dylan W.H. Sung
Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology, Guillaume Jacques
Guillaume Jacques
Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist of Breton descent who specializes in the study of Tibeto-Burman languages, in particular Old Chinese, Tangut and Tibetan...
Periodization of Chinese Phonology, Marjorie K.M Chan

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