What "Ancient" Chinese Sounded Like - and how we know
Uncovering the Ancient Imperial Language of China
This transcript discusses the history of Chinese pronunciation and how scholars uncovered their ancient imperial language.
The Challenge of Recovering Ancient Pronunciations
- Chinese scholars were reconstructing proto-languages centuries before Europeans.
- Recovering the sounds immortalized in classical texts was a challenge.
- There were no recordings, phonetic transcriptions, or even an alphabet to work with.
- Scholars worked with characters, each one standing for a one-syllable word or word piece.
The Qièyùn Method
- Chen Li used the Qièyùn method to capture the sound of a syllable.
- The method involved using two more characters: an upper character to match the initial consonant and a lower character to rhyme with the final sounds, including tone.
- With this method, you can capture the sound of a syllable.
Organizing Phonology into Tables
- Rhymers needed to organize information into tables for an overview of Chinese phonology.
- The 12th century Rhyme Mirror is full of rime tables that give more info about syllables.
- Interpretation is debated.
Flaws in Previous Research
- Confident scholars spent centuries sounding out ancient Chinese syllables and teaching that Chinese had exactly 36 initial consonants.
- Chen Li's linked sets revealed flaws: there weren't 36 initials; there were 41. Five of them needed to be split in two.
- Later research showed that even the earlier stage itself is complicated. It's a compromise between ancient literary dialects.
Precise Sounds
- In the early 1900s, a Swede traveled to China and dug into old rimes and tables but wanted precise sounds that fit into boxes for four tones, initials, and finals.
The Evolution of Chinese Pronunciation
This section discusses the evolution of Chinese pronunciation and how it has changed over time.
Ancient Pronunciations
- Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese use Sino-Xenic pronunciations for Chinese characters.
- These pronunciations point back to an ancient pronunciation that ended in a consonant, like /kwək̚˧/.
- Linguists have refined these reconstructions and painted acoustic portraits of Ancient Chinese that would sound foreign in Mandarin today.
Middle Chinese
- "Middle" refers to a period in linguistic history called Middle Chinese.
- There is an even older language to uncover, a thousand years older still.
- Maybe one day we'll rhyme our way into Old Chinese.
Conclusion
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