Middle Chinese


Middle Chinese or the Qieyun system is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren believed 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.
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 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.

Rime 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 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. 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, 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 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. Chen's method was to equate two fanqie initials 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 東 was given using the fanqie spelling 德紅, the pronunciation of 德 was given as 多特, and the pronunciation of 多 was given as 德河, from which we can conclude that the words 東, 德 and 多 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 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 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 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 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 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:
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. 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, 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:

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 and Schaank compared the rime tables at the front of the Kangxi Dictionary with modern pronunciations in several varieties, but had little knowledge of linguistics.
Bernhard Karlgren, trained in transcription of Swedish dialects, carried out the first systematic survey of modern varieties of Chinese. He used the oldest known rime tables as descriptions of the sounds of the rime dictionaries, and also studied the Guangyun, at that time the oldest known rime dictionary. Unaware of Chen Li's study, he repeated the analysis of the fanqie required to identify the initials and finals of the dictionary. He believed that the resulting categories reflected the speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. He interpreted the many distinctions as a narrow transcription of the precise sounds of this language, which he sought to reconstruct by treating the Sino-Xenic and modern dialect pronunciations as reflexes of the Qieyun categories. A small number of Qieyun categories were not distinguished in any of the surviving pronunciations, and Karlgren assigned them identical reconstructions.
Karlgren's transcription involved a large number of consonants and vowels, many of them very unevenly distributed. Accepting Karlgren's reconstruction as a description of medieval speech, Chao Yuen Ren and Samuel E. Martin analysed its contrasts to extract a phonemic description. Hugh M. Stimson used a simplified version of Martin's system as an approximate indication of the pronunciation of Tang poetry. Karlgren himself viewed phonemic analysis as a detrimental "craze".
Older versions of the rime dictionaries and rime tables came to light over the first half of the 20th century, and were used by such linguists as Wang Li, Dong Tonghe and Li Rong in their own reconstructions. Edwin Pulleyblank argued that the systems of the Qieyun and the rime tables should be reconstructed as two separate systems, which he called Early and Late Middle Chinese, respectively. He further argued that his Late Middle Chinese reflected the standard language of the late Tang dynasty.
The preface of the Qieyun recovered in 1947 indicates that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere. Several scholars have compared the Qieyun system to cross-dialectal descriptions of English pronunciations, such as John C. Wells's lexical sets, or the notation used in some dictionaries. For example, the words "trap", "bath", "palm", "lot", "cloth" and "thought" contain four different vowels in Received Pronunciation and three in General American; these pronunciations and others can be specified in terms of these six cases.
Although the Qieyun system is no longer viewed as describing a single form of speech, linguists argue that this enhances its value in reconstructing earlier forms of Chinese, just as a cross-dialectal description of English pronunciations contains more information about earlier forms of English than any single modern form. The emphasis has shifted from precise phones to the structure of the phonological system. Li Fang-Kuei, as a prelude to his reconstruction of Old Chinese, produced a revision of Karlgren's notation, adding new notations for the few categories not distinguished by Karlgren, without assigning them pronunciations.
This notation is still widely used, but its symbols, based on Johan August Lundell's Swedish Dialect Alphabet, differ from the familiar International Phonetic Alphabet. To remedy this, William H. Baxter produced his own notation for the Qieyun and rime table categories for use in his reconstruction of Old Chinese.
All reconstructions of Middle Chinese since Karlgren have followed his approach of beginning with the categories extracted from the rime dictionaries and tables, and using dialect and Sino-Xenic data in a subsidiary role to fill in sound values for these categories. Jerry Norman and W. South Coblin have criticized this approach, arguing that viewing the dialect data through the rime dictionaries and rime tables distorts the evidence. They argue for a full application of the comparative method to the modern varieties, supplemented by systematic use of transcription data.