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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 ...
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.
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.
(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.
"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
A xiesheng (Chinese: 諧聲; pinyin: xiéshēng; lit. 'harmonious sound') or phonological series is a set of Chinese characters sharing the same sound-based element. [1] Characters belonging to these series are generally phono-semantic compounds , where the character is composed of a semantic element (or radical ) and a sound-based element ...
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. [2]