A Handbook of 'Phags-Pa Chinese

Introduction

Introduction China is blessed with one of the oldest continuously used writing systems in the world. But this unique script has been the bane of historical phonologists, because it is logographic rather than alphabetic. Due to this peculiarity, the script effectively conceals from phonologists the pronunciations that underlie it. This is not to say that there is no field of Chinese historical phonology. Quite to the contrary, there has been such a field for well over a century. But it is a curious and often vexatious discipline. To pursue it certain complex and idiosyncratic textual materials, such as fanqie JitlJ collectanea, rime tables, versified texts, and sets of structurally related logographs, are juxtaposed, shuffled, and manipulated to construct abstract systems, whose phonetic reality is then postulated using formalized sets of assumptions and procedures. The products of these procedures are conventionally called "reconstructions," and they often differ considerably from one investigator to another. The result is that for any given period in the history of Chinese one may find a perplexingly broad choice of these "systems," all arising out of the same corpora of data. The fact that these systems are called "reconstructions" is in a sense potentially misleading. For the procedures underlying them are for the most part rather different from those applied by historical linguists who use the classical comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction to study the sound systems of earlier languages. In fact, the sinological approach probably has more in common with the techniques of textual analysis and phonetic interpretation familiar to students of ancient written languages like Latin, Greek, Old English, etc. The difference is of course that these languages are written alphabetically and the interpretation of their writing systems is simpler by many orders of magnitude than what is done in Chinese. This may in good part account for the existence of the multiple systems in the Chinese field. To wit, it may be that the available data simply cannot bear the weight sinologists place upon them. Put another way, while it may indeed be feasible to learn significant things about earlier Chinese phonology from the written sources in question, it may not be possible to reconstitute entire sound systems on that basis. In any case, it seems clear that the field of Chinese historical phonology as it is practiced today is so peculiar and exacting that it lies essentially beyond the reach both of sinologists who have not received specialized training in it and of the broad range of historical linguists who might wish to familiarize themselves with it. One may, if one wishes, consult handbooks and learn anything xiii Introduction from a bit to a great deal about English, French, German, or Spanish historical phonology. But pre-modern Chinese phonology remains for most non-specialist readers a closed book. Interestingly, however, besides the abovementioned logographic sources, there exists for certain varieties of standard Chinese a corpus of systematic alphabetic records, commencing in the thirteenth century and continuing to the present day. (We exclude here the sizable corpus of Tibetan, Uyghur, and other transcriptional materials of Tang times, since these do not employ systematic orthographic systems.) This alphabetic material begins in 1269 with Chinese recorded in the 'Phags-pa alphabet. Then, from the mid-1400s, we have Korean transcriptions written in a specially modified version of the Han'gUl alphabet. These materials record both a reading pronunciation and a spoken pronunciation for the southern sound system (i.e., the so-called Nfmyln) 1¥i~ of the Ming !jJ3/Qlng mkoine, known in traditional times as Guanhua '§~§. Alphabetic materials for this same southern-based Guanhua pronunciation resume in the late sixteenth century in the orthographies developed by Western missionaries and continue until the demise of the Nanyln in the nineteenth century. Starting in the sixteenth century we also have Korean records for the northern pronunciation (i.e., Beiyln ::!~~) of the Guanhua koine. And in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there are records of this type of speech in Manchu orthography. And again in the eighteenth century there are Western (mainly French) records of this type of speech. Then, in the nineteenth century we find a wide range of Western sources on the Beiyln, which ultimately feed directly into twentieth-century recordings of Gu6yu ~~:g/put5nghua ~w~rs. It seems clear that this rich corpus of orthographic material, covering a span of over seven centuries, can and should form the basis of an alphabetically based history of standard Chinese pronunciation. For the period in...