Reconstructing the s- prefix in Old Chinese

Language Sciences, 1991

This paper is a report of the preliminary results of an attempt to reconstruct Proto-Chinese based on linguistic data from modem Chinese dialects. Ever since Karlgren, Etudes SW la phonologie chinoise. Archives d'&udes orientales. (1915), studies in Chinese historical linguistics have been following the same approach: take one of the ancient rhyme tables as the starting point and give a phonetic representation to each of the sound categories in the table, drawing evidence from sources such as modem dialects, Sinoxenic pronunciations, etc. This approach has been sharply criticized by Norman, Chinese. (1988). who suggested an alternative approach: ignore the ancient rhyme dictionaries and rhyme tables and work backward from modern dialects on. This paper supports and argues for this position. Based on systematic cognate correspondence sets in 17 Chinese dialects collected from Hanyu Fangyan Zihui [A Collection of Chinese Characters with Dialectal Pronunciations], a Proto-Chinese sound system is reconstructed with 29 onsets and 74 rhymes, which is simpler and more natural than the 37 onset and 139 rhyme system Karlgren reconstructed. Various rules of sound change are proposed to account for the modern dialectal reflexes of the proto-forms. Irregularities are discussed in light of recent theories of language change, in particular the theory of lexical diffusion. Based on the proposed rules of sound change, a family tree model is built to illustrate the subgrouping relationship among the dialects under investigation.

Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2018

The morphophonology of Old Chinese has usually been reconstructed as an earlier version of the traditional reconstruction of Middle Chinese, with exclusively monosyllabic morphemes. For Old Chinese some scholars have posited syllabic morphemes with long or short vowels, or even polysyllabic morphemes, and other theories have been proposed, but it is still assumed that by Late Old Chinese any longer morphemes that once existed were already monosyllabic. However, Central Asian loans in Chinese suggest some disyllabic morphemes still existed in Late Old Chinese. They seem to be confirmed by a new study of little-noted Old Japanese transcriptions known as nigōgana. Thus the hitherto problematic Old Chinese and Old Japanese transcriptions of foreign words such as Saka and Buddha, and the monosyllabic theory of Old Chinese morphology, must be reconsidered. This paper's new reconstructions conform to the data and have great implications for the reconstruction of Old Chinese as well as for the reconstruction of the early Chinese loans into Japanese.

This paper presents potential cognates of the qusheng derivations in more conservative languages of the Trans-Himalayan family, in particular Rgyalrongic and Kiranti. It is suggested in particular that the valency-increasing uses of the qusheng could be related to the applicative -t suffix and that its valency-decreasing uses may be a trace of the reflexive -si suffix.

2004

This paper considers an important syllabic contrast, *-ivs. *-ji-, in the Old Chinese reconstruction system of Li . It is noted that revisions to Li's system that have been proposed over the last three decades have eliminated this contrast in all but a few phonological environments. This raises the question of whether the contrast is tenable at all, and suggests that Li's system should ver further revised by eliminating the contrast altogether. Such a revision would force us to consider alternative views of the Old Chinese vowel system, and of the nature of Old Chinese *-j-, which have been topics of debate in the field in recent years.

… : Morphology, phonology and the lexicon in …, 1998

The present paper illustrates some of the major known morphological processes of Old Chinese-roughly, the language of the Chinese classical texts of the Zhou E dynasty (llth-3rd centuries BCE). To speak of morphological processes in Old Chinese may surprise some ...

Trames, 2021

The present paper reports the intensive controversy on Chinese historical phonology that broke out in 2002. After sorting through over 150 Chinese papers on the intensive controversy by the Sino-linguists' side and the descriptivists' side, the present study suggests that we should investigate a history of the new hypotheses, and discuss them in a logical order. The hypothesis of the liquid medial for division-2 in OC of the descriptivists' side is refuted with philological arguments and a negative control of comparative evidence. The hypothesis of the vocalic medial for division-2 in OC of the Sino-linguists' side is supported with Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Uralic comparative evidence. Using etymological methods, the present study has identified nine (9) Sinitic and Uralic shared etymologies. Four (4) Shennong (Sino-Uralic) etymologies belong to a rhyme correspondence. Five (5) Shennong (Sino-Uralic) etymologies belong to another rhyme correspondence. These two (2) regular sound correspondences validate the etymological connections between Sinitic and Uralic.

2015

The reconstruction of Old Chinese consonant clusters, and, a fortiori, remnants of derivational morphology, apart from exploiting root homologies within and across traditionally recognized phonophoric (xiesheng 諧聲) series, relies heavily on the analysis of character reading variants attested in the post-classical Chinese commentarial literature. While Lu Deming's 陸德明 (556-637) Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 [Glossed characters from the Classics], as the earliest extant and most comprehensive compendium of variants encountered in the classics has been quite extensively scoured for clues on the reconstruction of OC morphology during recent years (see, e.g., Huang Kunyao 1992, Sagart 1999, Sun Yuwen 2000), later collections have been by and large neglected so far. One of these is Jia Changzhao's 賈昌朝 (998-1065) Qunjing yin bian 群經音辨 [Differentiation of the sounds in the Classics], which, despite its rather late date, incorporates many genuine Early Medieval readings. In this paper I will focus on the fanqie spellers and glosses detailed in Jia's chapter "Bian zi yin qing zhuo" 辨字音清濁 ["On the Differentiation of 'clear' (voiceless) and 'muddy' (voiced) readings"; j. 6], compare them with competing glosses in other chapters of the book as well as in other pre-Tang commentaries, and show how the implied derivatonal affixes fit into current theories of Old Chinese morphology (i.e. Sagart 1999, Schuessler 2002, Jin Lixin 2002).