Five Comments on “A Chinese Phonological Enigma” by Professor Geoffrey Sampson

Professor Sampson’s paper discusses a key issue in Chinese exegesis, philology and linguistics with traditional assumptions and contemporary explorations. The argument and the analysis given by Professor Sampson are very inspirational and thought-provoking. In the following, I would like to provide some preliminary thoughts on the issues involved in his paper.

1. ABOUT READING OLD CHINESE ALOUD

There seem to be opposing views of the same fact. On the one hand, some scholars may think that “homophony in the Old Chinese of three thousand years ago may not have been strikingly greater than in modern European languages.” On the other hand, most people agree that “No-one can understand a passage of read aloud without sight of the script.” The question is, if Old Chinese is indeed like modern European languages in terms of homophony, then it should not be the case that no one can understand it when read aloud. In fact, even if both statements are true, there is a hidden factor in the latter statement that “No one can understand a passage of read aloud without sight of the script.” That statement assumes that the passage of is read aloud in modern pronunciation, not in archaic pronunciation, which is determined by archaic phonology (which may not be known forever in a strict sense). This may further imply that we may not fully understand classical texts by reading them with the modern phonological system.

2. SOME EVIDENCE FOR MORAIC FOOT STRUCTURE IN ARCHAIC CHINESE

I am aware of the following statement made by Professor Sampson:

But when things reach the point where a largely monomorphemic vocabulary has to be replaced by a largely bimorphemic vocabulary in order to preserve intelligibility, as happened in Mandarin, it seems certain that the language as it would have been without vocabulary replacement would have exceeded any tolerable level of ambiguity.

The process of replacement of a monomorphemic vocabulary by a bimorphemic vocabulary of classical documents started around the Warring States Period¹ and it is traditionally called “disyllabication,” which implies, implicitly or explicitly, a monosyllabic origin of the language. Whether Old (Proto-) Chinese was purely monosyllabic or not, recent studies show that Archaic (or proto-) Chinese may have had a different prosodic structure from Medieval Chinese (Pulleyblank 1962:58-144), Pan 2000, Zhengzhang 2003, Behr 2004). For example, emphatic forms (thus, heavier), as contrasted with non-emphatic counterparts (hence, weaker) as seen in (1) indicate that mora, rather than syllable (as in Medieval and Modern Chinese), was taken into account for prosodic weight in Old Chinese (before 300 BC). For example (the phonological reconstructions are based on Baxter 1992):

1. 1).

   1. a.

      *ŋra   sang *ŋajɁ.         Zhuangzi (ca. BC. 369-286)

          I     lost     I

      ‘I lost myself.’

   2. b. Mencius (ca. BC. 372-289)

      *prjajɁ zhangfu ye, *ŋajɁ zhangfu ye,   *ŋra   he   wei     prjajɁ zai?

        He     man     prt.     I     man     prt,     I     why   afraid   he     prt.

      ‘HE is a man, I am a man, how come I am afraid of HIM.’

In these examples, pronouns are used in stressed positions (the object position, for example, as seen in [1a]) or contrastively, heavier forms such as *ŋajɁ (containing more than one mora) are favored over their counterpart lighter ones, such as *ŋra (containing only one mora) for the first person pronoun ‘I’.

Another example given by Pan Wuyun is the distinction encoded through vowel alternations between stressed (or emphatic) and unstressed (weakened) forms for OC demonstratives. Cĭ and shì are among the stressed (or emphatic) forms. Thus, we may like to consider, or at least be aware of, the suggestion that Archaic Chinese may be a quantity-sensitive language (Feng 2013). If so, the contracts below and can be characterized as a heavy syllable (which is more sonorant or has more moras) vs. a light syllable (which is less sonorant or has fewer moras). It also makes sense in terms of Focus Prosody Correspondence Principle (Zubizarreta 1998:88): the focused element is stressed (or heavier).

1. 	*ts	-ə
   	*tsh	-eɁ
   	*tj	-ə
   	*dj	-eɁ2

Further evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from the two-syllable per line structure...