A Phonological History of Chinese by Zhongwei Shen (review)

A Phonological History of Chinese is an important and welcome contribution, which attempts to fill a glaring gap in English-language scholarship on Chinese language history. It is intended for “both the general phonologist and specialist of Chinese studies, as well as both beginners and experts” (p. xxxiv). The book is divided into six parts. The first presents the complex and daunting set of concepts and terminology that arise from the peculiar history of phonological analysis of Chinese. Mastering this knowledge is essential to an understanding of key source materials and the secondary scholarship derived from them. The remaining five parts correlate with the traditional phonological periodization of Chinese phonology: Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, the transitional period from Middle Chinese to Mandarin, Old Mandarin, and Modern Mandarin.

This way of structuring the book implies a conservative—what some would call “Karlgrenian”—understanding of Chinese language history, as a series of northern standards proceeding in a straight line of direct inheritance from the Western Zhou dynasty down to the modern Beijing-based standard Chinese of the PRC. But the author ends up presenting a far more nuanced and valuable understanding of Chinese language history, one that emerges with increasing clarity through the later chapters.

The author, Zhongwei Shen, begins the introductory chapter by stating flatly: “The study of the phonological history of Chinese is in essence a study of a history of phonological standards.” (p.3). As a matter of disciplinary practice this is a fair description of much work in historical Chinese phonology by 20^th-century linguists, but as an assertion of fact it is incorrect. So much so that it is contradicted by Shen’s very next sentence: “Historically, the Chinese language is a set of not just variants in time but variants in space as well.” The third sentence of the introduction clarifies that the opening sentence presents an authorial choice, not an immutable truth: “the purpose of this book is not to cover all the available historical variants in time and space, but to focus on the phonological standards of major historical periods.”

What Shen’s book covers, then, is but one possible phonological history of Chinese, limited in perspective. It can be taken as an implicit rejection of the call made by Jerry Norman and W. South Coblin in 1995 for a new approach to Chinese historical linguistics that shifts focus away from artificially elaborated literary standards encoded in dictionaries of character readings and onto “the comparative and historical study of human speech in China” (Norman and Coblin 1995, 576).

Ironically, however, Shen’s initial characterization of his own book proves to be overly reductive. The second half of the work, which deals with northern varieties of Chinese from the Song Dynasty to the present (i.e., the last 1,000 years or so), ranges far beyond descriptions of “phonological standards” to provide a detailed and fascinating summary of what textual sources can tell us about varieties of Chinese language spoken across space and time. And it is precisely this second half of the book where Shen makes the greatest contribution to Chinese historical phonological studies, and which makes this book so valuable to the linguist or China specialist with an interest in this subject matter.

The first three parts of the book are of lesser significance. The first part, “The Keys to Traditional Phonology”, introduces the source materials, concepts, and terminology connected to Middle Chinese, the native phonological tradition that grew up around it, and 20^th-century scholarship on its reconstruction. This material is the traditional starting point for teaching and research in historical Chinese phonology, and as many university students have learned, it is rough going. The terminology is daunting, the concepts are esoteric and opaque, and the connections to actual language pronunciations are often tenuous or unclear. I suspect that for the reader who is not already familiar with this subject matter, the dense and abstract presentation will not be easy to follow. This is...