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Norman suggested that type B syllables (his class C), which comprised over half of the syllables of the Qieyun, were in fact unmarked in Old Chinese. Instead, he proposed that the remaining syllables were marked by retroflexion (the *-r- medial) or pharyngealization, either of which prevented palatalization in Middle Chinese. [ 121 ]
Middle Chinese had a structure much like many modern varieties, with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, four tone-classes (though three phonemic 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.
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. [a] The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty.
[182] [183] Norman suggested that type B syllables (his class C), which comprised over half of the syllables of the Qieyun, were in fact unmarked in Old Chinese. Instead, he proposed that the remaining syllables were marked by retroflexion (the *-r- medial) or pharyngealization , either of which prevented palatalization in Middle Chinese. [ 123 ]
The Old Chinese voiceless lateral and nasal initials yielded a * tʰ initial in eastern dialects and * x in western ones. [34] [35] By the Eastern Han, the Old Chinese voiced lateral had also evolved to * d or * j, depending on syllable type. [36] The gap was filled by Old Chinese * r, which yielded Eastern Han * l and Middle Chinese l. [37]
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 voiceless stops that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages.In addition, Old Chinese is commonly thought to have syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ [1] [2] (sometimes called the "long entering tone" while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone").
In syllables with labial initials, Middle Chinese -m codas had already dissimilated to -n before the Old Mandarin period. [21] The remaining -m codas merged with -n before the early 17th century, when the late Ming standard was described by European missionaries Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault . [ 41 ]