The traditional analysis of the Chinese
syllable, derived from the
fanqie method, is into an initial consonant, or "initial", ( ) and a final ( ). Modern linguists subdivide the final into an optional "medial" glide ( ), a main vowel or "nucleus" ( ) and an optional final consonant or "coda" ( ). Most reconstructions of Middle Chinese include the glides and , as well as a combination , but many also include vocalic "glides" such as in a diphthong . Final consonants , , , , , , and are widely accepted, sometimes with additional codas such as or . Rhyming syllables in the
Qieyun are assumed to have the same nuclear vowel and coda, but often have different medials. Middle Chinese reconstructions by different modern linguists vary. These differences are minor and fairly uncontroversial in terms of consonants; however, there is a more significant difference as to the vowels. The most widely used transcriptions are
Li Fang-Kuei's modification of Karlgren's reconstruction and
William Baxter's typeable notation.
Initials The preface of the
Yunjing identifies a traditional set of
36 initials, each named with an exemplary character. An earlier version comprising 30 initials is known from fragments among the
Dunhuang manuscripts. In contrast, identifying the initials of the
Qieyun required a painstaking analysis of
fanqie relationships across the whole dictionary, a task first undertaken by the Cantonese scholar
Chen Li in 1842 and refined by others since. This analysis revealed a slightly different set of initials from the traditional set. Moreover, most scholars believe that some distinctions among the 36 initials were no longer current at the time of the rime tables, but were retained under the influence of the earlier dictionaries. Early Middle Chinese (EMC) had three types of stops: voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. There were five series of
coronal obstruents, with a three-way distinction between
dental (or
alveolar),
retroflex and
palatal among
fricatives and
affricates, and a two-way dental/retroflex distinction among
stop consonants. The following table shows the initials of Early Middle Chinese, with their traditional names and approximate values:
Old Chinese had a simpler system with no palatal or retroflex consonants; the more complex system of EMC is thought to have arisen from a combination of Old Chinese obstruents with a following and/or .
Bernhard Karlgren developed the
first modern reconstruction of Middle Chinese. The main differences between Karlgren and newer reconstructions of the initials are: • The reversal of and . Karlgren based his reconstruction on the
Song dynasty rime tables. However, because of mergers between these two sounds between Early and Late Middle Chinese, the Chinese phonologists who created the rime tables could rely only on tradition to tell what the respective values of these two consonants were; evidently they were accidentally reversed at one stage. • Karlgren also assumed that the EMC
retroflex stops were actually
palatal stops based on their tendency to co-occur with front vowels and , but this view is no longer held. • Karlgren assumed that voiced consonants were actually
breathy voiced. This is now assumed only for LMC, not EMC. Other sources from around the same time as the
Qieyun reveal a slightly different system, which is believed to reflect southern pronunciation. In this system, the voiced fricatives and are not distinguished from the voiced affricates and , respectively, and the retroflex stops are not distinguished from the dental stops. Several changes occurred between the time of the
Qieyun and the rime tables: • Palatal sibilants merged with retroflex sibilants. • merged with (hence reflecting four separate EMC phonemes). • The palatal nasal also became retroflex, but turned into a new phoneme rather than merging with any existing phoneme. • The palatal allophone of () merged with () as a single laryngeal initial (). • A new series of labiodentals emerged from labials in certain environments, typically where both fronting and rounding occurred (e.g. plus a back vowel in William Baxter's reconstruction, or a
front rounded vowel in Chan's reconstruction). However, modern
Min dialects retain bilabial initials in such words, while modern
Hakka dialects preserve them in some common words. • Voiced
obstruents gained phonetic
breathy voice (still reflected in the
Wu Chinese varieties). The following table shows a representative account of the initials of Late Middle Chinese. The voicing distinction is retained in modern
Wu and
Old Xiang dialects, but has disappeared from other varieties. In Min dialects the retroflex dentals are represented with the dentals, while elsewhere they have merged with the retroflex sibilants. In the south these have also merged with the dental sibilants, but the distinction is retained in most
Mandarin dialects. The palatal series of modern Mandarin dialects, resulting from a merger of palatal allophones of dental sibilants and velars, is a much more recent development, unconnected with the earlier palatal consonants.
Finals The remainder of a syllable after the initial consonant is the final, represented in the Qieyun by several equivalent second
fanqie spellers. Each final is contained within a single rhyme class, but a rhyme class may contain between one and four finals. Finals are usually analysed as consisting of an optional medial, either a
semivowel, reduced vowel or some combination of these, a vowel, an optional final consonant and a tone. Their reconstruction is much more difficult than the initials due to the combination of multiple phonemes into a single class. The generally accepted final consonants are semivowels and , nasals , and , and stops , and . Some authors also propose codas and , based on the separate treatment of certain rhyme classes in the dictionaries. Finals with vocalic and nasal codas may have one of three
tones, named level, rising and departing. Finals with stop codas are distributed in the same way as corresponding nasal finals, and are described as their
entering tone counterparts. There is much less agreement regarding the medials and vowels. It is generally agreed that "closed" finals had a rounded glide or vowel , and that the vowels in "outer" finals were more open than those in "inner" finals. The interpretation of the "divisions" is more controversial. Three classes of
Qieyun finals occur exclusively in the first, second or fourth rows of the rime tables, respectively, and have thus been labelled finals of divisions I, II and IV. The remaining finals are labelled division-III finals because they occur in the third row, but they may also occur in the second or fourth rows for some initials. Most linguists agree that division-III finals contained a medial and that division-I finals had no such medial, but further details vary between reconstructions. To account for the many rhyme classes distinguished by the
Qieyun, Karlgren proposed 16 vowels and 4 medials. Later scholars have proposed numerous variations.
Tones The four tones of Middle Chinese were first listed by
Shen Yue . The first three, the "even" or "level", "rising" and "departing" tones, occur in open syllables and syllables ending with
nasal consonants. The remaining syllables, ending in
stop consonants, were described as the "
entering" tone counterparts of syllables ending with the corresponding nasals. The
Qieyun and its successors were organized around these categories, with two volumes for the even tone, which had the most words, and one volume each for the other tones. The pitch contours of modern reflexes of the four Middle Chinese tones vary so widely that linguists have not been able to establish the probable Middle Chinese values by means of the
comparative method. Karlgren interpreted the names of the first three tones literally as level, rising and falling pitch contours, respectively, and this interpretation remains widely accepted. Accordingly, Pan and Zhang reconstruct the level tone as mid ( or 33), the rising tone as mid rising ( or 35), the departing tone as high falling ( or 51), and the entering tone as ˧3ʔ. Some scholars have voiced doubts about the degree to which the names were descriptive, because they are also examples of the tone categories. Some descriptions from contemporaries and other data seem to suggest a somewhat different picture. For example, the oldest known description of the tones, which is found in a Song dynasty quotation from the early 9th century
Yuanhe Yunpu (no longer extant): Level tone is sad and stable. Rising tone is strident and rising. Departing tone is clear and distant. Entering tone is straight and abrupt. In 880, the Japanese monk Annen, citing an account from the early 8th century, stated the level tone was straight and low, ... the rising tone was straight and high, ... the departing tone was slightly drawn out, ... the entering tone stops abruptly. Based on Annen's description, other similar statements and related data,
Mei Tsu-lin concluded that the level tone was long, level and low, the rising tone was short, level and high, the departing tone was somewhat long and probably high and rising, and the entering tone was short (as the syllable ended in a voiceless stop) and probably high. The tone system of Middle Chinese is strikingly similar to those of its neighbours in the
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area—
proto-Hmong–Mien,
proto-Tai and early
Vietnamese—none of which is genetically related to Chinese. Moreover, the earliest strata of loans display a regular correspondence between tonal categories in the different languages. In 1954,
André-Georges Haudricourt showed that Vietnamese counterparts of the rising and departing tones corresponded to final and , respectively, in other (atonal)
Austroasiatic languages. He thus argued that the Austroasiatic proto-language had been atonal, and that the development of tones in Vietnamese had been conditioned by these consonants, which had subsequently disappeared, a process now known as
tonogenesis. Haudricourt further proposed that tone in the other languages, including Middle Chinese, had a similar origin. Other scholars have since uncovered transcriptional and other evidence for these consonants in early forms of Chinese, and many linguists now believe that
Old Chinese was atonal. Around the end of the first millennium AD, Middle Chinese and the southeast Asian languages experienced a
phonemic split of their tone categories. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late
Tang dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as the "upper" and "lower". When voicing was lost in most varieties (except in the
Wu and
Old Xiang groups and some
Gan dialects), this distinction became phonemic, yielding up to eight tonal categories, with a six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables.
Cantonese maintains these tones and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables, resulting in a total of nine tonal categories. However, most varieties have fewer tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin dialects the lower rising category merged with the departing category to form the modern falling tone, leaving a system of four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were reassigned to one of the other four tones.
Changes from Old to Modern Chinese Middle Chinese had a structure similar to many modern varieties, especially conservative ones like Cantonese, with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, three tones, and a syllable structure consisting of initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants. Without counting 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. There were no tones, a smaller imbalance between possible initial and final consonants, and many 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. The system is similar to the system reconstructed for
Proto-Sino-Tibetan and still visible, for example, in
Classical Tibetan; it is also largely similar to the system that occurs in the more conservative
Austroasiatic languages, such as modern
Khmer. 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 and eliminated the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants). That has led to a gradual decrease in the number of possible syllables.
Standard Mandarin has only about 1,300 possible syllables, and many other
varieties of Chinese even fewer (for example, modern
Shanghainese has been reported to have only about 700 syllables). The result in Mandarin, for example, has been the proliferation of the number of two-syllable compound words, which have steadily replaced former monosyllabic words; most words in Standard Mandarin now have two syllables. ==Grammar==