The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language

Sin-Wai Chan, Sin-Wai Chan, Chan Sin-Wai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317382485
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language is an invaluable resource for language learners and linguists of Chinese worldwide, those interested readers of Chinese literature and cultures, and scholars in Chinese studies. Featuring the research on the changing landscape of the Chinese language by a number of eminent academics in the field, this volume will meet the academic, linguistic and pedagogical needs of anyone interested in the Chinese language: from Sinologists to Chinese linguists, as well as teachers and learners of Chinese as a second language.

The encyclopedia explores a range of topics: from research on oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, to Chinese language acquisition, to the language of the mass media. This reference offers a guide to shifts over time in thinking about the Chinese language as well as providing an overview of contemporary themes, debates and research interests.

The editors and contributors are assisted by an editorial board comprised of the best and most experienced sinologists world-wide. The reference includes an introduction, written by the editor, which places the assembled texts in their historical and intellectual context. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

1
Ancient Chinese

Alain Peyraube

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE, ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES, PARIS, FRANCE

1. Introduction

‘Chinese is only one of a very few languages whose history is documented in an unbroken tradition extending back to the second millennium BC’ (Norman 1988: ix). Chinese is usually divided into Ancient Chinese (gǔdài hànyǔ 古代汉语) and Contemporary Chinese (xiàndài hànyǔ 现代汉语). Ancient Chinese is simply defined as ‘the language of the writings of the past’ (Wang 1979: 1). It covers a very long period, from the oracle bone inscriptions (OBI, the first Chinese inscriptions known to us, dated from the fourteenth century BCE) until the nineteenth century. Three basic stages are generally distinguished for Ancient Chinese: (i) the Archaic period (shànggǔ 上古), until the second century BCE; (ii) the Middle or Medieval period (zhōnggǔ 中古), from the first century BCE to the middle of the thirteenth century CE; (iii) the Modern period (jìndài 近代), from the middle of the thirteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century.

It was during the Archaic period that what is known today as Classical Chinese (wényán 文言) was standardized. This language, playing a role like Latin in Europe, remained the main written language used in literary texts until the beginning of the twentieth century. The period for Classical Chinese par excellence refers more precisely to the language used by the philosophers and scholars of the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) and it was probably not very different from the educated speech of the period. The gap between the written and the spoken language began to develop in Han times or Pre-Medieval Chinese (206 BCE – CE 220) and increased considerably with time. It is essentially Classical Chinese, also called Late Archaic Chinese (hòu shànggǔ hànyǔ 后上古汉语), that will be discussed in this chapter. I will nevertheless make several digressions regarding the period prior to the fifth century BCE, i.e. what is known as pre-Classical Chinese or Early Archaic Chinese (qián shànggǔ hànyǔ 前上古汉语), and about the Medieval period, especially in the phonological section.

2. Phonology

The history of Chinese phonology is usually divided into four periods based on the two important rhyme dictionaries, the Qiēyùn 《切韵》 of 601 and the Zhōngyuán yīnyùn 《中原音韵》 (Rhymes according to the pronunciation of the Central Plains) of 1324: Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Old Mandarin, and Modern Chinese. Old Chinese refers to the period before the Qiēyùn and is the earliest period; the Qiēyùn represents the beginning of Middle Chinese; the Zhōngyuán yīnyùn represents the beginning of Old Mandarin; and Modern Mandarin is the period leading up to present time, with no fixed dates. See Peyraube and Shen (forthcoming).

2.1. Old Chinese phonology

The source materials for Old Chinese phonological reconstruction, mainly based on rhyming materials (largely drawn from the Shī jīng 《诗经》 (The Book of odes), eleventh–sixth centuries BCE), do not allow us to clearly identify the reconstructed phonological forms in space and time.

The syllable in Old Chinese is analyzed as being composed of an initial and a final. Following Baxter (1992: 7), whose inventory of phonetic segments is given below, (i) the initial contains a pre-initial (treated as a prefix in Baxter and Sagart 1998) and an initial (Table1.1), and (ii) the final contains a medial, a main vowel (Table 1.2), a coda, and a post-coda (Table 1.3).

Table 1.1 37 Old Chinese initials (Baxter 1992: 177)

Table 1.2 The six main vowels (Baxter 1992: 180)

i	ɨ	u
e		o
	ɑ

Table 1.3 Old Chinese codas (Baxter 1992: 181)

zero	k	ŋ
j	t	n
w	wk
	p	m

Three medial elements have been reconstructed: *-r-, *-j- (though the reconstruction of the medial *-j- has now been replaced by a contrast of vowel length), and, marginally, *-l-. The two post-codas are *-ʔ and *-s, which are the respective sources of the rising tone (shǎngshēng 上声) and of the departing tone (qùshēng 去声) in Middle Chinese.

This reconstructed Old Chinese phonemic system is far from being universally accepted. In fact, several specialists continue to consider that we are unable to do more than to approach a reconstruction of Old Chinese.

2.2. Middle Chinese phonology

The reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology, in a more accurate sense, means the reconstruction of phonetic values for the existing categories, which are usually assumed to be phonemic.

Table 1.4 Middle Chinese initials (Baxter 1992: 45)

The basic medials are the glides -j- and -w-.

The reconstruction of main vowels has changed several times. Efforts have been made to reduce the number of main vowels and to make the vo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Consultant Editors
• List of Contributors
• The Chinese Language: The Global, Historical, and Linguistic Aspects
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Ancient Chinese
• 2 Cantonese
• 3 Cantonese Romanization
• 4 Chinese Characters
• 5 Chinese Idioms
• 6 Chinese Language and National Identity
• 7 Chinese Language Education: Teacher Training
• 8 Chinese Language in a Global Context
• 9 Chinese Language Pedagogy
• 10 Chinese Linguistics
• 11 Chinese Linguistics: Pragmatics
• 12 Chinese Linguistics: Semantics
• 13 Chinese Morphology
• 14 Chinese Neologisms: Word-formation Strategies in Chinese
• 15 Chinese: Parts of Speech
• 16 Chinese Proverbs and Popular Sayings
• 17 Chinese Psycholinguistics
• 18 Chinese Rhetoric
• 19 Chinese Slang
• 20 Chinese Syntax
• 21 Chinese Taboo
• 22 Chinese Xiehouyu
• 23 Classical Chinese
• 24 Computational Linguistics
• 25 Corpus-based Study of Chinese
• 26 Elastic Words in Chinese
• 27 Hakka Dialect
• 28 Hanyu Pinyin
• 29 Hong Kong Sign Language
• 30 Lexicography
• 31 Lexicography in the Contemporary Period
• 32 Loanwords
• 33 Mandarin
• 34 Mandarin and Other Sinitic Languages
• 35 Metaphor in Chinese: Cognition, Culture, and Society
• 36 Modern Chinese: Written Chinese
• 37 Poetic Prosody
• 38 Psycholinguistics: Reading Chinese
• 39 Semantic Change in Chinese
• 40 Standard Chinese
• 41 Syntax
• 42 Wade–Giles Romanization System
• Index