Pre-Emc Dialects: Some Notes
Creators: name: Behr, Wolfgang
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2003

description: <strong>Abstract:</strong>

Despite an emergent consensus with regard to a view of the Qièyùn as a composite, but pho­nologically coherent metasystem, reflecting the compilers’ attempt at literary standardization, but also grounded in at least two “real” regional varieties of pre-Tang Chinese, few attempts have been made to <br>
(a) explicitly seperate the two layers of Nanking and Luòyáng based reading traditions (but see Pulleyblank 1984, or, for a more radical approach Chan 1997, forthc.), which were the focus of the lost rhyming dictionaries on which the text was originally based<br>
(b) go beyond the philological work of Serruys (1959), Zhou Zumo (1982, 1993), Coblin (1983, 1987), Ding Qizhwn (1991) et al. in their attempts to differentiate dialectal variants in the “dark ages” between the Qin-Han and the Sui. <br>
Acknowledging the fact that Starostin (1989) had tried to include evidence from a variety of literary, sinoxenic an dialectal sources into his six stage reconstruction from Old to Middle Chinese, Pulleyblank has criticized his treatment as “entirely ad hoc and not to be taken se­riously” (2001: 35), while Baxter’s account of the same period is characterized as “no more than a series of lines drawn between forms that are set up independently for two languages over a millenium apart” (2001: 33) by him. Conversely, Miyake in his recent candid overview of Early Middle Chinese reconstructions complains that although “Pulleyblank is always to be commended for collecting data neglected by his peers” (1999: 373),  his “post-1962 OC is largely rather theory- than data-driven: there is no evidence apart from his own assumptions for many of the unusual sound channges that he has proposed between OC and MC such as*ak &gt; *d, *kW &gt; *t/c, *xy &gt; *tH, *xWr &gt; *thr, *Ny &gt; *l.”” (1999: 350). <br>
Focusing on two phenomena — the geography of irregular tongjia contacts between nasal and stop initials implying late southern clusters of the type *NP- and *NK-, and the distribution of “di­visons” across rhyming characters in Qín-Hàn and early Medieval inscriptional rhyming — I will try to illustrate the potential role of the increasingly available excavated materials for a fine-grained analysis of the phonological evolution during the post-OC/pre-EMC period and address several related methodological issues.<br>
Finally I will stress the following (rather unpleasant) point: The success of any given recon­struction within the field of Chinese historical linguistics, other branches of sinology, Central Asian studies and general linguistics — rather than being exclusively judged with respect to its capacity to account parsimouniously for conflicting bodies of internal and external evi­dence — typically depends more on the availability of convenient reference materials to the reconstruction, its notational “downward compatibility” with earlier proposals, or on demon­strations of its usefulness to approach questions such as the dating of texts, the understanding of literary patterns, the identification of cultural loans and etymologies of historical or philsophical significance etc. At a time when historical linguistics as a whole is under increa­sing institutional pressure from other more fashionable linguistic disciplines, it is therefore more important than ever to avoid an outside perception of the field as a secret debating so­ciety, given to internecine infighting about irrelevant phonetic arcana. <br>
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References<br>
Chan, Abraham (1997), “Early Middle Chinese: Towards a new paradigm”, Paper presented at ICCL-6, Leiden, 25 pp.<br>
Coblin, Weldon South (1983), A Handbook of Eastern Han Sound Glosses, Hong Kong : CUP.<br>
———— (1987), “Some sound changes in the western Han dialect of Shu”, Journal of Chinese Lin­guistics 14 (2): 184-227. <br>
Ding Qizhen (1991), Qin-Han fangyan, Beijing : Dingfeng.<br>
Miyake, Marc Hideo (1999), The phonology of eigth century Japanese revisited: another recon­struction based upon written records, Ph.D. Diss., University of Hawai’i [unpublished]<br>
Pulleyblank, Edwin George (1984), Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology, Vancou­ver : University of British Columbia Pr.<br>
———— (2001). “Syllable structure and morphology in Old Chinese”, in: R. Djamouri ed., Collec­ted Essays in Ancient Chinese Grammar: 25-61, Paris : EHESS/CRLAO.<br>
Serruys, Paul L.-M. (1959), The Chinese Dialects of Han Time according to Fang Yen (University of Cali­fornia Publications in East Asiatic Philology; 2), Berkeley &amp; Los An­geles : University of Cali­fornia Pr.<br>
Starostin, Sergej A. (1989), Rekonstrukcija drevnekitajskoj fonologicheskoj sistemy, Moskva : Nauka.<br>
Zhou Zumo (1982), “Wei-Jinyin yu Qi-Liangyin”, Zhonghua Wenshi Luncong 23 (3): 167-189.<br>
———— (1993), “Handai de fangyan”, in: Zhou Zumo xueshu lunzhu zixuanji: 138-145, Beijing : Beijing Shifan Daxue.
description: Organization: Old Chinese/Middle Chinese Symposium in honour of E.G. Pulley­blank, Creel Center, University of Chicago