Historical Chinese phonology

• 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, widely considered 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 through to 12th century AD. More narrowly, reconstructed "Middle Chinese" is usually based on the detailed phonetic evidence of the Qieyun rime dictionary, later expanded into "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 to the present. Most modern varieties appear to have split off from a Late Middle Chinese koine of about 800 AD.

Overview

Periodization of Chinese

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.
2. W. A. C. H. Dobson uses the term Early Archaic Chinese to refer to the same period, 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"; that is, the period near the beginning of the Han dynasty.
4. Late Han Chinese is c. 200 AD. This is around the time that Min Chinese varieties diverged from the others.
5. Old Northwest Chinese, 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, 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, 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, was the language inferred in the 'Phags-pa script, the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese. It is also documented in the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn.
9. Middle Mandarin, up through c. 1800, documented in numerous Chinese, Korean and European sources. Among these are Chinese-Korean pedagogical texts such as Hongmu Chôngyun Yôkhun and Sasông T’onghae ; the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary of the Christian missionaries Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri; a dictionary by a friar, Basilio Brollo, also known as Basile da Glemona, a grammar of Mandarin by Francisco Varo and Chinese rhyme manuals such as the Yunlüe Huitong.
10. 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

1. 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.
2. Lack of knowledge of Sanskrit by most Chinese scholars precluded direct reading of the original works on Sanskrit grammar.
3. 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

• Rime dictionaries and rime tables of the Middle Chinese era, such as the Qieyun and Yunjing.
• Modern Chinese speaking variants such as Yue, Hakka, Mandarin, Min, Wu etc.
• Sino-Xenic data — Chinese loanwords borrowed in large numbers into Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean, especially during the period of 500–1000 AD. This large-scale borrowing led to the so-called Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean vocabularies of these languages.
• Other early cases of Chinese words borrowed into foreign languages or transcribed in foreign sources, e.g. Sanskrit works in India.
• Early cases of transliteration of foreign words from other languages such as Sanskrit and Tibetan into Chinese.
• Chinese written in the 'Phags-pa script, a brief period when Chinese was written in an alphabetic script.
• Transcriptions of Chinese by foreigners, especially the Hangul transcriptions of Koreans such as Sin Sukchu and works by various Christian missionaries and other Westerners, the oldest of which is Matteo Ricci's Portuguese–Chinese dictionary of 1583–1588.

• The rhymed texts written before the Qin dynasty, chiefly the Shijing, the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry.
• The fact that characters sharing the same phonetic component had very similar pronunciations when the characters were first created.
• Comparison of Old Chinese with other Sino-Tibetan dialects.

Old Chinese phonology

1. A syllable consisted of an initial consonant, an optional medial glide, a main vowel, an optional final consonant, and an optional post-final consonant or. There were also various pre-initial consonants. Pre-initial and post-final consonants were frequently used in morphological derivation.
2. There was no MC-style tone, but there was a distinction of some sort between type-A and type-B syllables. Depending on the linguist, the distinction is variously thought to reflect either presence or absence of prefixes, an accentual or length distinction on the main vowel, or some sort of register distinction. These different reconstructions may not be mutually exclusive.
3. Compared with EMC, there were no palatal or retroflex consonants, but there were labiovelar consonants. Baxter also reconstructs voiceless resonants, e.g.,.
4. There were on the order of six main vowels:,,,,, .
5. The system of final consonants was similar to EMC; however, there was no. Baxter also reconstructs final, later becoming.

From Old Chinese to Early Middle Chinese

Initial consonants

Palatalisation of velar initials

Lenition of OC /ɡ/

Retroflex initials

Sonorant fortition

Medials and finals

• Type-B syllables developed a glide. This glide combined with a previous coronal consonant to produce new palatal consonants. It also sometimes turned a preceding velar or laryngeal into a palatal sibilant and/or raised a following main vowel.
• The glide eventually disappeared, but before doing this it turned a previous coronal consonant into a retroflex consonant, and fronted a following main vowel.
• Changes to final consonants: became ; dropped after ; dropped before ; before became .
• Tones developed from the former suffixes, with MC tone 3 developing from, tone 2 developing from, and tone 1 from other syllables. As the suffixes were part of the derivational morphology of OC, this often produced MC tonal variation, either in a single word or in semantically related words.
• Back vowels and, when followed by a coronal consonant, broke into plus a front vowel.
• Labiovelar initials were reanalyzed as a velar followed a glide, which merged with from breaking of and.
• The main vowel developed in various complicated ways, depending on the surrounding sounds. For example, in type-A syllables, according to Baxter's reconstruction, OC became after ; otherwise, after coronal initials, after velar initials, and after labial initials. In type-B syllables, however, OC became after or coronal initial, but otherwise.

From Early Middle Chinese to Late Middle Chinese

• The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme.
• A new class of labiodentals emerges, from EMC labials followed by and an EMC back vowel.
• EMC complex medial becomes, producing a six-way medial distinction between none,,,,,. The phonemic glides and are vocalic and before short vowels and, but semivocalic and before long vowel.
• The eight-way EMC distinction in main vowels is significantly modified, developing into a system with high vowels,, and, and non-high vowels,,. However, this is best analyzed as a system with a four-way main vowel distinction between no vowel and the three phonemic vowels,, ; high vowels are then analyzed as phonemically consisting of a medial and no main vowel.
• High front medials/main vowels and are lost after EMC retroflex sibilants, prior to merging with palatals; contrarily, a sometimes appears after guttural consonants.

Labiodentalization

Vowel changes and mergers

1. becomes after labial, velar and glottal consonants, elsewhere. A change of this sort occurs in all modern reconstructions of EMC and LMC, and is responsible for the creation of Division IV.
2. and after a non-high front vowel become and . This may not be a real change; Pulleyblank's EMC system already includes and, whereas they are not present in any modern dialect. The most direct evidence for these sounds comes from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, which was borrowed from LMC and does reflect the sounds. In Pulleyblank's LMC system, only occurs in the rhymes and, which contrast with and ; likewise for. These contrasts would be reflected in some other way in a system without and.
3. The sequence merges into. In some dialects, however, it instead remains separate. According to Abraham Y.S. Chan, the former change was characteristic of the Luoyang dialect, while the latter reflected the Jinling dialect. The distinction between the two surfaces in Standard Mandarin as a respective distinction between ai and ya, or pai/pei and pa.

1. EMC finals,,, merge into ; likewise becomes.
2. The hekou equivalents of the above become.
3. The III-4 chongniu equivalents of both of the above become and, respectively.

1. EMC final becomes ; likewise, becomes.
2. The EMC sequence becomes, and becomes.
3. All remaining, except in the sequences and, become.
4. All non-final become, and become.

1. When there is no medial, remaining and become.
2. All remaining,,, become.

1. Non-final and become, while become.
2. The medials and merge into a single phoneme, with occurring before and, and elsewhere. Medial and merge in the same way.

1. appears between a guttural consonant and a directly following. This sets the stage for palatalized syllables in Standard Mandarin such as jia and xian.
2. A final directly following a dental sibilant becomes .
3. After an EMC retroflex sibilant, a directly following high-front vowel or glide is removed, specifically:
4. #A glide is lost.
5. #A main vowel becomes if non-final.
6. #A main vowel becomes if final.
7. #If high front-rounded vocalics are reconstructed, they unround.

Late changes to initial consonants

• EMC palatals become retroflex, with palatal sibilants merging with retroflex sibilants and palatal becoming a new phoneme .
• Voiced consonants are thought to have become breathy voiced. This is a non-phonemic change; it is postulated to account for the breathy-voiced consonants still present in Wu Chinese, and the common outcome elsewhere of originally voiced consonants as unvoiced aspirates. Karlgren reconstructed breathy voicing for EMC as well, but this is no longer thought to be the case due to lack of any evidence for it in borrowings to or from EMC. This may have occurred to differing extents in different places:
• *Among the two Chinese varieties that have not merged voiced and unvoiced consonants, Wu reflects the EMC voiced consonants as breathy voiced, but Old Xiang reflects them as normally voiced.
• *Gan and Hakka reflect all EMC voiced consonants as unvoiced aspirates, but many others only have such aspirated consonants in syllables within the yang ping tone, the light-level tone. Similarly, many words in Hokkien Min that are read with the yang ping tone are unaspirated, developing from Old Chinese and Middle Chinese voiced initials. Some words have aspirated readings, however, which led some linguists to believe that there may be a voiced aspirated series in the Proto-Min language, which had branched off from Old Chinese before it developed into Middle Chinese.

From Late Middle Chinese to Standard Mandarin

Initials

• Voiced stops and sibilants were devoiced; the stops became aspirated in syllables with tone 1 and unaspirated otherwise.
• Retroflex stops merged into retroflex affricates.
• Sonorants: retroflex nasal merged into alveolar nasal;, formerly palatal nasal in EMC, became or sometimes the syllable er; velar nasal was dropped.
• Before high front vowel or glide, velars and alveolar sibilants palatalized and merged as a new series of alveolo-palatal sibilants.
• The glottal stop was dropped; before a high front glide, the voiced velar fricative was dropped.
• Labiodentals:, devoiced, merged into ; became.

Finals

• LMC medial classes and merge, losing the ; likewise for and.
• LMC front medials and are lost after retroflex consonants. The operation of this change is exactly as for the similar change that occurred after EMC retroflexes. The difference between EMC retroflex and palatal sibilants is sometimes reflected in Mandarin, for example between she and shi .
• LMC medial is lost after labials, and unrounds to.
• LMC medial is sometimes lost after and.
• Various other changes occur after particular initials.

• Long vowel shortens.
• Various other complex changes; see Middle Chinese.

• LMC coda becomes.
• LMC stop codas are dropped, with sometimes becoming and.
• LMC complex codas and become simple codas; likewise for and, but often with effects on the preceding vowel.

Tones

Branching off of the modern varieties

Works cited