Historical Chinese Phonology - From Early Middle Chinese To Late Middle Chinese

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 /ɻ/.
  • A new class of labiodentals emerges, from EMC labials followed by /j/ and an EMC back vowel.
  • EMC complex medial /jw/ becomes /y/, producing a six-way medial distinction between none, /i/, /ji/, /w/, /y/, /jy/. The phonemic glides /i/ and /y/ are vocalic and before short vowels /a/ and /ə/, but semivocalic and before long vowel /aː/.
  • 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/, /aː/. 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/, /aː/; 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.

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