Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of historical varieties of Chinese. Since Chinese is written with logographic characters rather than alphabetically or with a syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in other language families such as the Indo-European languages, due to the lack of recorded pronunciations.
Chinese is documented over a long period of time, with the earliest oracle bone writings dated to c. 1250 BC. However, since the writing is mostly with logographic characters, which do not directly specify the phonology of the language, reconstruction is generally quite difficult, and depends to a large extent on auxiliary sources that more directly document the language's phonology. On the basis of these sources, historical Chinese is divided into the following basic periods: Old Chinese, broadly from about 1250 BC to 25 AD, when the Han dynasty came back to power after the Xin dynasty. More narrowly, reconstructed "Old Chinese" is based on the rhymes of early poetry such as the Shijing and the phonological components of Chinese characters, and is assumed to represent the language of c. 1000–700 BC. Eastern Han Chinese (25–220AD) is widely considered to be the middle ground between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese, as well as being the ancestor of Proto-Min. It is attested from texts such as the Shiming, the Shuowen Jiezi, commentaries on the Chinese classics, and Buddhist works transcribed, translated and/or glossed into Chinese. Middle Chinese, broadly from about the 5th century AD (Northern and Southern dynasties, Sui, Tang, Song) through to 12th century AD. More narrowly, reconstructed "Middle Chinese" is usually based on the detailed phonetic evidence of the Qieyun rime dictionary (601 AD), later expanded into the Guangyun. The Qieyun describes a compromise between the northern and southern varieties, and such rhyming dictionaries were essential to write and read aloud poetry with a rhyming pattern. Modern varieties, from about the 13th century AD (in the beginning of the Yuan dynasty, in which Early Mandarin was developed) to the present. Most modern varieties appear to have split off from a Late Middle Chinese koine from around 800 AD (with the exception of Min around 100 AD and Wu around 500 AD).
Overview Middle Chinese had a structure much like many modern varieties, with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, four tone-classes (though three phonemic tones), and a syllable structure consisting of an initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants. Aside from the glide, no clusters could occur at the beginning or end of a syllable.
Old Chinese, on the other hand, had a significantly different structure. Most scholars have concluded that there were no tones, a lesser imbalance between possible initial and final consonants, and a significant number of initial and final clusters. There was a well-developed system of derivational and possibly inflectional morphology, formed using consonants added onto the beginning or end of a syllable. This system is similar to the system reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan and still visible, for example, in the written Tibetan language; it is also largely similar to the system that occurs in the more conservative Mon–Khmer languages, such as modern Khmer (Cambodian).
The main changes leading to the modern varieties have been a reduction in the number of consonants and vowels and a corresponding increase in the number of tones (typically through a pan-East-Asiatic tone split that doubled the number of tones while eliminating the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants). This has led to a gradual decrease in the number of possible syllables. In Standard Mandarin, this has progressed to a farther extent than elsewhere, with only about 1,200 possible syllables. The result, in Mandarin especially, has been the proliferation of the number of two-syllable compound words, which have steadily replaced former monosyllabic words, to the extent that the majority of words in Standard Mandarin are now composed of two syllables.
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:
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). 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. Dobson uses the term Late Archaic Chinese to refer to the "4th to 3rd century BC"; that is, the period near the beginning of the Han dynasty. Late Han Chinese (LHC) is c. 200 AD. This is around the time that Min Chinese varieties diverged from the others. 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. 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. 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. Early Mandarin, c. 1300 AD (sometimes specifically given as 1269–1455. The Yuan dynasty conquered the whole of China in 1279 and was overpowered by the Ming dynasty in 1368), was the language inferred in the 'Phags-pa script, the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese. It is also documented in the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn ( "Sounds and Rhymes of the Central Plains", an opera manual of 1324 AD written by Zhou Deqing). 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 missionaries Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri; a dictionary by a friar, Basilio Brollo (1692-1694), also known as Basile da Glemona, a grammar of Mandarin by Francisco Varo (1703) and Chinese rhyme manuals such as the Yunlüe Huitong (1642). Modern Standard Chinese, a standardized form of the dialect of Beijing that is little changed from the 19th century. It was promulgated during the Republic of China in 1932. Today, it is the standard variety in the PRC, founded by Mao Zedong in 1949.
Chinese native phonological traditions
A native tradition of Chinese phonology developed in the Middle Chinese period. Chinese linguists had long compiled dictionaries and attempted to identify the pronunciation of difficult characters by specifying homophone characters. During the early centuries AD, however, the more advanced method of fanqie was developed, which allowed the pronunciation of any syllable to be specified unambiguously by using one character to indicate the initial consonant and another to indicate the remainder. By the sixth century AD, systematic attempts were made to compile lists of all characters and specify their pronunciation by way of fanqie, culminating in rime dictionaries such as the Qieyun (601 AD).
During the next few centuries, the increasing influence of Buddhism and Buddhist scholars brought Chinese linguists in touch with the tradition of Sanskrit grammar, which included a highly advanced understanding of phonology and phonetics, including a system of analyzing sounds by distinctive features, such as place of articulation and type of phonation. This led to rime tables such as the Yunjing (c. 1150 AD), a sophisticated analysis of the sound system of the Qieyun.
During the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), scholars such as Duan Yucai diligently studied the sound system of Middle and Old Chinese. Through careful examination of rime tables, rime dictionaries and patterns of rhyming among poets of various eras, these scholars were able to work out the system of categories of rhymes in Old Chinese, and discover additional Middle Chinese categories that had previously been overlooked. However, progress in Chinese linguistics was seriously hampered by the lack of any concept of a phoneme — i.e. a basic unit of sound, including vowels and vowel-like segments as well as consonants. This made it impossible to go beyond determination of systems of rhyming categories to reconstruction of the actual sounds involved.
In some ways, the lack of native Chinese development of the concept of a unit of sound is surprising, as it had already been developed by Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini by the 4th century BC at the latest, and the phonological analysis of the Yunjing shows a close familiarity with the tradition of Sanskrit grammar. Furthermore, some non-Chinese writing systems within the Chinese cultural orbit, such as the Korean script and especially the Tibetan script, were developed under the close influence of Indian writing systems and have the concept of phoneme directly embedded in them. (Furthermore, the 'Phags-pa script, an alphabetic script of Tibetan origin, had been used to write Chinese itself during the Mongolian Yuan dynasty, c. 1270–1360, although it later fell out of use.) It seems likely, however, that The strong influence and long tradition of Chinese writing, which included no concept of an alphabet and always treated the rhyming part of a syllable as a single unit, made it difficult to independently develop the concept of a unit of sound. Lack of knowledge of Sanskrit by most Chinese scholars precluded direct reading of the original works on Sanskrit grammar. Cultural attitudes that treated Koreans, Tibetans, Mongolians and most other foreigners as "barbarians" made it difficult for scientific knowledge from these cultures to diffuse into China.
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 nine 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.