A Handbook of 'Phags-Pa Chinese

IV. A Structural and Historical Consideration of the 'Phags-pa Chinese Sound System

IV A Structural and Historical Consideration of the 'Phags-pa Chinese Sound System 4.1 Preliminary Matters 4.1.1 The Comparative and Historical Study of Standard Forms of Pronunciation. The types of language which serve as koines are invariably those which have some sort of wider application in an extended speech community. And of these, the ones which are reduced to writing and come to serve as standard written languages usually have not only broad currency but also social and/or political prestige of some sort. It is these traits of particular languages which have given rise to the majority of written records with which historical linguists deal. The extensive recording of specifically non-standard or regional vernaculars (i.e., "dialects") is a phenomenon of recent times. It was little known in the past. Furthermore, so far as we know, incontestably direct descent from some earlier standard form of language has not been a criterion for selecting and recording a current language as standard. Whether such direct descent has been present or not seems to have been a matter of happenstance rather than design. In this connection, it is interesting to consider briefly two sample cases from the histories of languages other than Chinese. 4.1.1.1 Old English and Middle English.l In the Old English period (mid-fifth century to mid-eleventh century) there were four major dialect types: Kentish, West Saxon, Mercian, and Northumbrian. In the ninth century, cultural ascendancy devolved upon the kingdom of Wessex; and during the time of King Alfred (849899 ) his capital, Winchester, became the chief center of learning in England. As a result, West Saxon was the language in which important texts of this period were written. In fact, it is the texts in this language, together with those transcribed into it from other dialects, which form the literary corpus of what is normally spoken of as "Old English." "Standard Old English" was, in other words, a West Saxon-based language. 69 A Handbook of 'Phags-pa Chinese Middle English (mid-eleventh century to ca. 1500) can actually be divided into two sub-periods, i.e., Early Middle English (mid-eleventh century to mid-fourteenth century) and Late Middle English (mid-fourteenth century to 1500). It is in fact to the latter period that the term Middle English is commonly applied. Late Middle English was rooted in the language of London. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer (1342/43-1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, etc., which are often thought of as prototypical Middle English texts, was born and died in London. In the second half of the fourteenth century, London saw a massive immigration from the Midlands area, and as a result its speech contained numerous Midlands features. This language was not a "Midlands dialect" as such. It was instead a composite koine in which Midlands features were preponderant. Now, looking backward to the Old English period, we see that the Midlands dialects were derived not from West Saxon dialects but rather from Mercian ones. Thus, Middle English and its more or less direct descendant, Modem Standard English, are not the direct phonological descendants of Old English. As a convenient fiction they are sometimes spoken of as if they were, but this usage is imprecise and is not found in technical works on the history of English. 4.1.1.2 Middle High German and Modem Standard German.2 The medieval period of German language history is usually said to date from 1050 to 1500. The term Middle High German conventionally refers to a written or literary language dating primarily from ca. 1170 to 1230 and called mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache ("Middle High German poetic language") by specialists. Textual evidence attests to a number of spoken dialect groups or types for the German Middle Ages. Three of these are of interest to us here. In a broad swath of the central part of Germanspeaking Europe was found Middle German. In the south was Upper German ("upper" referring to topographical altitude), of which there were two sub-types, a western one called Alemannic and an eastern one called Bavarian. In addition to the ordinary dialects as such, in the High Medieval period there began to form in the princely courts a polite, socially elevated chivalric language, sometimes referred to as the Rittersprache ("language of the knights"). Since many of the ancestral estates of the landed nobility were in Franconia and Swabia (the latter in the Alemannicspeaking area), the speech patterns of...