Historical Chinese Phonology - Modern Methods of Reconstruction

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 sinologist Bernhard Karlgren. Armed with his knowledge of Western historical linguistics, 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 (Wu), Fuzhou (Eastern Min), and Guangdong (Cantonese). 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 analysis of the Guangyun rime dictionary (a later version of the 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 and Henri Maspero also made great contributions in the field during the early days of its development. Karlgren himself had no direct access to the Qieyun, which was thought lost; however, fragments of the Qieyun were discovered in the Dunhuang 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, 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 and rime tables of the Middle Chinese era, such as the Qieyun (601 AD) and Yunjing (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, Japanese and Korean, 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 works in India.
• Early cases of transliteration of foreign words from other languages such as Sanskrit and Tibetan 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 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'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-Tang 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, chiefly Shijing, 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 dialects.