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Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
The improved understanding of Old Chinese phonology has enabled the study of the origins of Chinese words (rather than the characters with which they are written). Most researchers trace the core vocabulary to a Sino-Tibetan ancestor language, with much early borrowing from other neighbouring languages. [ 137 ]
The Yunjing (simplified Chinese: 韵镜; traditional Chinese: 韻鏡; pinyin: Yùnjìng; lit. 'Mirror of rhymes') is one of the two oldest existing examples of a Chinese rime table – a series of charts which arrange Chinese characters in large tables according to their tone and syllable structures to indicate their proper pronunciations.
A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional Chinese: 韻圖; pinyin: yùntú; Wade–Giles: yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties.
The Manual of The Phonetic Symbols of Mandarin Chinese; Unicode reference glyphs for "bopomofo" (PDF). (69.6 KB) and "extended bopomofo" (PDF). (61.6 KB) Bopomofo annotations – adds inline and pop-up annotations with bopomofo pronunciation and English definitions to Chinese text or web pages.
Baxter's A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology [2] is the standard reference for the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. Together with Laurent Sagart at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, he has produced an improved reconstruction of the pronunciation, vocabulary, and morphology of Old Chinese. [ 3 ]
Chinese phonology is covered by the following articles: Concerning modern Chinese: Standard Chinese phonology; Cantonese phonology; For the phonology of other varieties of Chinese, see the articles on the particular varieties; For an overview, see Varieties of Chinese → Phonology; Concerning pre-modern Chinese: Historical Chinese phonology