Old Mandarin - Phonology

Phonology

The phonology of Old Mandarin is most clearly defined in the Zhongyuan Yinyun. The 'Phags-pa script and the Menggu Ziyun tend to retain more traditional elements, but are useful in filling in the spartan description of the Zhongyuan Yinyun. The language shows many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.

In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates showed a three-way contrast between voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth, or "entering tone", comprising syllables ending in stops (-p, -t or -k). Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang Dynasty each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials. When voicing was lost in all dialects except the Wu group, this distinction became phonemic, and the system of initials and tones was re-arranged differently in each of the major groups.

The Zhongyuan Yinyun shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and loss of the entering tone. The distribution of entering tone syllables across syllables with vocalic codas in the other tones differs somewhat from the standard language:

• lower even tone in syllables with voiced obstruent initials,
• rising tone in syllables with voiceless initials, except ʔ, and
• departing tone in syllables with sonorant initials and ʔ.

However such syllables are placed after others of the same tone in the dictionary, perhaps to accommodate Old Mandarin dialects in which former entering tone syllables retained a final glottal stops, as in modern northwestern and southeastern dialects. In another distinctive Mandarin development, voiced stops and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others.

The initial /ʜ/ denotes a voiced laryngeal onset functioning as a zero initial. It was almost in complementary distribution with the initial /ŋ/, and the two have merged in most modern dialects as a zero initial, or .

The distinction between the dental and retroflex sibilants has persisted in northern Mandarin dialects, including that of Beijing, but the two series have merged in southwestern and southeastern dialects. A more recent development in some dialects (including Beijing) is the merger of palatal allophones of dental sibilants and velars, yielding a palatal series (rendered j-, q- and x- in pinyin).

However the language still retained a final -m, which has merged with -n in modern dialects.