China has a long linguistic tradition. Did you know Chinese scholars were digging into
old pronunciations centuries before Europeans were reconstructing proto-languages? This
is the tale of how they uncovered their ancient imperial language.
I struggle with Chinese pronunciation. I have ever since the dictionary and cassettes my
Grandad once gave me for my birthday. But lately I've been burying myself in hundreds
of pages of Chinese linguistic history, and you know what? I'm in good company! Chinese
pronunciation puzzled experts in China for a long, long time. Like this fellow.
A scholar reconstructing a language in the 1840s. You know the story by now, I've told
it before: compare a group of related languages, classify them into a family tree, then reconstruct
their common ancestor.
Oh, but that's not the story this time! The scholar is Chén Lǐ.
He's confronting a centuries-old problem.
How do you recover the sounds immortalized in classical texts? How do you make the old
poems rhyme again? Here's the catch: you have no recordings. No phonetic transcriptions.
Not even an alphabet. You're working with characters, the Han characters we've talked
about before, each one standing for a one-syllable word or word piece.
He scrutinizes the book in front of him. It looks old, stodgy even,
but it has quite a backstory.
1261 years earlier, a Mr Lù invited 8 friends over for a slumber party. They started
their evening with wine and conversation, but, late in the night, the chit-chat turned
into a heated debate over the exact pronunciation of old texts. The way people recite them in
North is wrong. No, they're wrong in the South. Enough talk! Mr Lù inked his brush and outlined
what would become the Qièyùn.
He eventually filled five scrolls with over 11000 characters divided among the four Chinese
tones and subdivided into rhyming groups. Then he broke down the sound of each character.
How? With two more characters! An upper character to match the initial consonant, and a lower
character to rhyme with the final sounds, including the tone. Take the character here,
meaning "east". It had the initial of /tək̚/ and the final of /ɦuŋ/, so using the reconstructed
pronunciation we'll talk about at the end, it's /tuŋ/.
With this method, called fǎnqiè, you can capture the sound of a syllable! Simple. And
clever. But it stopped short of giving an overview of Chinese phonology. For that, rhymers
needed to take another step: organize this info into tables.
The 12th century Rhyme Mirror is full of rime tables. Here's one of them, the very first
table in the book.
The starting label gives the table number – number one – and the kind of rhyme these
syllables have, a sort of /uŋ/.
Along the top row are six articulation categories for consonants, and down the side, the four
tones. The four rows per tone give more info about the syllable, but their interpretation
is debated.
So try this: find me a tongue sound, a lingual, that's clear, meaning voiceless, and has the
first tone. So for this syllable type we've pieced together something like /tuŋ/. And
then there's a partly-clear one, meaning aspirated /h/, so kind of /tʰuŋ/? And this one is
dirty or muddy, which means a voiced sound, so maybe /duŋ/?
Ok! What about all these circles though? What do they mean? Syllable not found. So when
you look for a lip sound that's clear for the first tone in this chart, you find nothing
like /puŋ/ recorded here. But there is a /buŋ/, mugwort!
Just like that, you're excavating old pronunciations, Chinese rhyme style.
And so confident scholars spent centuries sounding out ancient Chinese syllables and
teaching that Chinese had exactly 36 initial consonants.
But Chen Li's not convinced. He's combing through old fǎnqiè, meticulously chaining
together initials of initials and finals of finals. His linked sets revealed flaws. There
weren't 36 initials, there were 41. Five of them needed to be split in two. But there's
more: the sounds in the rime tables are not the sounds in the Qièyùn. These are
two different stages.
Later research will go on to show that even the earlier stage itself is complicated. It's
a compromise between ancient literary dialects. Thinking back to those late-night debates
over the north vs the south, that sounds about right.
But all this hard work merely left us with categories. Boxes. Boxes for four tones. Boxes
for initials. Boxes for finals. Enough with the guesswork. What are the precise sounds
that really fit into these boxes?
In the early 1900s a Swede traveled to China and dug into the old rimes and tables but
then added an important piece: the many living varieties of Chinese. Karlgren was fascinated.
He created surveys and set out to document them, and he used his results to fill out
the rime categories with real sounds.
How? Well, take that fourth tone (also called the checked tone). Along the southern coast,
these checked tone syllables have a final stop sound . So this old character, meaning
country, is /kuo˧˥/ in Mandarin, but in Cantonese it's /kwok̚˧/. Who's older? Well,
look at the last three languages in Karlgren's list of "dialects": Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese.
They use Sino-Xenic pronunciations, meaning "China-foreign", basically the way the characters
sounded to them when they were imported. Their words also have that k. It points back to
an ancient pronunciation for that character that ended in a consonant, like /kwək̚˧/.
Linguists went on to refine these reconstructions and to paint acoustic portraits of Ancient
Chinese that would sound downright foreign in Mandarin today. They even revealed small
but important distinctions Karlgren missed, like these pairs of chóngniǔ.
And they taught me one last thing while I was over here struggling to understand Chinese
pronunciation. It's not a single language called Ancient Chinese.
No, it's a period in linguistic history called Middle Chinese.
"Middle"... because there's an even older
language to uncover, a thousand years older still.
Maybe one day we'll rhyme our way into Old Chinese. Until then, stick around and subscribe
for language.