Historical Chinese Phonology - Periodization of Chinese

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 script up through modern Standard Mandarin:

1. 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 period (c. 1250 to 771 BC).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Late Han Chinese (LHC) is c. 200 AD. This is around the time that the Min Chinese languages diverged from the others.
5. Old Northwest Chinese (ONWC), c. 400 AD, is a reconstruction by Weldon South Coblin of the language of the northwestern Chinese provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi that is immediately ancestral to a set of northwestern dialects documented by various early Tang dynasty authors.
6. Early Middle Chinese (EMC), c. 600 AD, is the language of the Qieyun rime dictionary, 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.
7. Late Middle Chinese (LMC), c. 1000 AD, is the native language of the authors of the Yunjing rime table and the oldest stage that can be reconstructed from modern non-Min varieties by the comparative method.
8. Early Mandarin, c. 1300 AD (sometimes specifically given as 1269-1455), was the language inferred in the 'Phags-pa script, the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese. 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).
9. 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; and Chinese rhyme manuals such as the Yunlue Huitong (1642).
10. Modern Standard Chinese, a standardized form of the dialect of Beijing that is little changed from the 19th century.