Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren thought that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC).
The fanqie method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century Yunjing and other rime tables (aka rhyme tables) incorporate a more sophisticated and convenient analysis of the Qieyun phonology. The rime tables attest to a number of sound changes that had occurred over the centuries following the publication of the Qieyun. Linguists sometimes refer to the system of the Qieyun as Early Middle Chinese and the variant revealed by the rime tables as Late Middle Chinese.
The dictionaries and tables describe pronunciations in relative terms, but do not give their actual sounds. Karlgren was the first to attempt a reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese, comparing its categories with modern varieties of Chinese and the Sino-Xenic pronunciations used in the reading traditions of neighbouring countries. Several other scholars have produced their own reconstructions using similar methods.
The Qieyun system is often used as a framework for Chinese dialectology. With the exception of Min varieties, which show independent developments from Old Chinese, modern Chinese varieties can be largely treated as divergent developments from Middle Chinese. The study of Middle Chinese also provides for a better understanding and analysis of Classical Chinese poetry, such as the study of Tang poetry.
Sources The reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology is largely dependent upon detailed descriptions in a few original sources. The most important of these is the Qieyun rime dictionary (601) and its revisions. The Qieyun is often used together with interpretations in Song dynasty rime tables such as the Yunjing, Qiyin lüe, and the later Qieyun zhizhangtu and Sisheng dengzi. The documentary sources are supplemented by comparison with modern Chinese varieties, pronunciation of Chinese words borrowed by other languages—particularly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese—transcription into Chinese characters of foreign names, transcription of Chinese names in alphabetic scripts such as Brahmi, Tibetan and Uyghur, and evidence regarding rhyme and tone patterns from classical Chinese poetry.
Rhyme dictionaries
Chinese scholars of the Northern and Southern dynasties period were concerned with the correct recitation of the classics. Various schools produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse. The Qieyun (601) was an attempt to merge the distinctions in six earlier dictionaries, which were eclipsed by its success and are no longer extant. It was accepted as the standard reading pronunciation during the Tang dynasty, and went through several revisions and expansions over the following centuries.
The Qieyun is thus the oldest surviving rhyme dictionary and the main source for the pronunciation of characters in Early Middle Chinese (EMC). At the time of Bernhard Karlgren's seminal work on Middle Chinese in the early 20th century, only fragments of the Qieyun were known, and scholars relied on the Guangyun (1008), a much expanded edition from the Song dynasty. However, significant sections of a version of the Qieyun itself were subsequently discovered in the caves of Dunhuang, and a complete copy of Wang Renxu's 706 edition from the Palace Library was found in 1947.
The rhyme dictionaries organize Chinese characters by their pronunciation, according to a hierarchy of tone, rhyme and homophony. Characters with identical pronunciations are grouped into homophone classes, whose pronunciation is described using two fanqie characters, the first of which has the initial sound of the characters in the homophone class and second of which has the same sound as the rest of the syllable (the final). The use of fanqie was an important innovation of the Qieyun and allowed the pronunciation of all characters to be described exactly; earlier dictionaries simply described the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters in terms of the most similar-sounding familiar character.
The fanqie system uses multiple equivalent characters to represent each particular initial, and likewise for finals. The categories of initials and finals actually represented were first identified by the Cantonese scholar Chen Li in a careful analysis published in his Qieyun kao (1842). Chen's method was to equate two fanqie initials (or finals) whenever one was used in the fanqie spelling of the pronunciation of the other, and to follow chains of such equivalences to identify groups of spellers for each initial or final. For example, the pronunciation of the character was given using the fanqie spelling , the pronunciation of was given as , and the pronunciation of was given as , from which we can conclude that the words , and all had the same initial sound.
The Qieyun classified homonyms under 193 rhyme classes, each of which is placed within one of the four tones. A single rhyme class may contain multiple finals, generally differing only in the medial (especially when it is ) or in so-called chongniu doublets.
Rime tables
The Yunjing () is the oldest of the so-called rime tables, which provide a more detailed phonological analysis of the system contained in the Qieyun. The Yunjing was created centuries after the Qieyun, and the authors of the Yunjing were attempting to interpret a phonological system that differed in significant ways from that of their own Late Middle Chinese (LMC) dialect. They were aware of this, and attempted to reconstruct Qieyun phonology as well as possible through a close analysis of regularities in the system and co-occurrence relationships between the initials and finals indicated by the fanqie characters. However, the analysis inevitably shows some influence from LMC, which needs to be taken into account when interpreting difficult aspects of the system.
The Yunjing is organized into 43 tables, each covering several Qieyun rhyme classes, and classified as: One of 16 broad rhyme classes ()—each described as either "inner" or "outer". The meaning of this is debated but it has been suggested that it refers to the height of the main vowel, with "outer" finals having an open vowel ( or , ) and "inner" finals having a mid or close vowel. "Open mouth" or "closed mouth", indicating whether lip rounding is present. "Closed" finals either have a rounded vowel (e.g. ) or rounded glide. Each table has 23 columns, one for each initial consonant. Although the Yunjing distinguishes 36 initials, they are placed in 23 columns by combining palatals, retroflexes, and dentals under the same column. This does not lead to cases where two homophone classes are conflated, as the grades (rows) are arranged so that all would-be minimal pairs distinguished only by the retroflex vs. palatal vs. alveolar character of the initial end up in different rows.
Each initial is further classified as follows: Place of articulation: labials, alveolars, velars, affricates and sibilants, and laryngeals Phonation: voiceless, voiceless aspirated, voiced, nasal or liquid
Each table also has 16 rows, with a group of 4 rows for each of the four tones of the traditional system in which finals ending in , or are considered to be checked tone variants of finals ending in , or rather than separate finals in their own right. The significance of the 4 rows within each tone is difficult to interpret, and is strongly debated. These rows are usually denoted I, II, III and IV, and are thought to relate to differences in palatalization or retroflexion of the syllable's initial or medial, or differences in the quality of similar main vowels (e.g. , , ). Other scholars do not view them not as phonetic categories, but instead as formal devices exploiting distributional patterns in the Qieyun to achieve a compact presentation.
Each square in a table contains a character corresponding to a particular homophone class in the Qieyun, if any such character exists. From this arrangement, each homophone class can be placed in the above categories.
Modern dialects and Sino-Xenic pronunciations The rime dictionaries and rime tables identify categories of phonetic distinctions but do not indicate the actual pronunciations of these categories. The varied pronunciations of words in modern varieties of Chinese can help, but most modern varieties descend from a Late Middle Chinese koiné and cannot very easily be used to determine the pronunciation of Early Middle Chinese. During the Early Middle Chinese period, large amounts of Chinese vocabulary were systematically borrowed by Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese (collectively the Sino-Xenic pronunciations), but many distinctions were inevitably lost in mapping Chinese phonology onto foreign phonological systems.
For example, the following table shows the pronunciation of the numerals in three modern Chinese varieties, as well as borrowed forms in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese: Modern Chinese varieties Sino-Vietnamese Sino-Korean(Yale) Sino-Japanese Middle Chinese Beijing Suzhou Guangzhou Go-on Kan-on 1 2 6 3 1 4 5 5 6 6 8 7 7 8 7 9 3 10 8
Transcription evidence Although the evidence from Chinese transcriptions of foreign words is much more limited, and is similarly obscured by the mapping of foreign pronunciations onto Chinese phonology, it serves as direct evidence of a sort that is lacking in all the other types of data, since the pronunciation of the foreign languages borrowed from—especially Sanskrit and Gandhari—is known in great detail.
For example, the nasal initials were used to transcribe Sanskrit nasals in the early Tang, but later they were used for Sanskrit unaspirated voiced initials , suggesting that they had become prenasalized stops in some northwestern Chinese dialects.
Methodology
The rime dictionaries and rime tables yield phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. At the end of the 19th century, European students of Chinese sought to solve this problem by applying the methods of historical linguistics that had been used in reconstructing Proto-Indo-European. Volpicelli (1896) and Schaank (1897) compared the rime tables at the front of the Kangxi Dictionary with modern pronunciations in several varieties, but had little knowledge of linguistics.