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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 start of the first rhyme class (東 dōng "east") of the Guangyun rhyme dictionary. Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese, is the phonological system of the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries.
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 ]
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.
(See the sections Vowels and Syllabic consonants of the article Standard Chinese phonology.) There are also unsupported symbols from local traditions that find their way into publications that otherwise use the standard IPA. This is especially common with affricates such as ƛ, and many Americanist symbols.
The Old National Pronunciation (traditional Chinese: 老國音; simplified Chinese: 老国音; pinyin: lǎo guóyīn) was the system established for the phonology of standard Chinese as decided by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation from 1913 onwards, and published in the 1919 edition of the Guóyīn Zìdiǎn (國音字典, "Dictionary of National Pronunciation").
"Old Chinese was a toneless language. Tones arose between Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese (that is between 500 BCE and 500 CE) as a result of the loss of final laryngeals." The four tones of Middle Chinese, 平 píng level, 上 shǎng rising, 去 qù departing, and 入 rù entering, all