Raphiphat Phatthana
6715100039
Classical Chinese Phonology (0132573) Final Paper:
Literature Review of the Emergent Chinese Phonological Studies
To make sense of a nuanced understanding of the phonetic
developments within the history of the Chinese language requires rigorous
training. Extensive literature on this topic from various sources is not
optional but compulsory. Hence, the primary goal of this literature review is
to introduce academic works on Old and Middle Chinese conducted by the
French school of Chinese Phonologists, Computational Linguists and the
Philologists who investigated the excavated texts such as the bamboo slips.
The scholars mentioned in this review article all come from prestigious
institutions such as Qinghua University, Kyoto University, CRLAO etc.
The Status of Classical Chinese is similar to that of Latin. The lexical
diffusion was witnessed by the use of Chinese writing in Korea and Japan.
After centuries, even though the obsolete form of sound ceased to exist. It is,
nevertheless, still possible to reconstruct it from observing the Chinese
Loanwords that neighboring countries of China have taken it. When the
Tungus (Manchus) has conquered China. The actual language used become
bilingual resulted in language evolution(Haudricourt, 1954).
For the French School, it is worthwhile to mention Andre Georges
Haudricourti since he pioneered the use of internal construction in Chinese
Historical Phonology. Hill (2016) rejects the proposal of Song conducted in
2014 who was unaware of the predecessor’s discovery. Hill insisted that the
person who has already long ago solved the stop coda problem was
Haudricourt. Haudricourt is known for the explanation of the origin of Middle
Chinese tones as rising from the lost segments. Haudricourt's main legacies
to the field of Chinese historical phonology are his systematic account of
tonogenesis, and his reconstruction of final *-s and of labiovelars. The
method that he proposed under the term of Panchronic Phonology holds
special promise for the study of the languages of China in their universal
context. “Old Chinese was believed to have only three tones up until the 9th
century. At that time, the voiced stops /g/, /j/ [IPA: ɟ], /d/ and /b/ devoiced
to /k/, /c/, /t/, /p/, aspirated or not depending on dialects and on tones. From
that point on, the musical height as opposed to the contour of the tone
became a contrastive phonological property used to distinguish words. Two
words which used to be distinct because one had an onset /k/ and the other
had an onset /g/ came to be distinguished solely by the higher tone of the
former. The three-tone system thus became a six-tone system”
(Haudricourt ,1954).
The second person to be reviewed is Guillaume Jacques ii. Dedicated
his career to Sino-Tibetan languages, particularly Old and Middle Chinese,
Jacques is best known for his theory on the *-s suffix in Old Chinese,
proposing it served multiple functions like nominalization and valence
change in Chinese morphological evolution. His application of panchronic
phonology is a framework seeking to uncover the universal principles of
sound change over time and across languages.
The next part is the computational application to Old and Middle
Chinese Reconstruction is still in the nascent stage, but it shows sign of
growing. When large volumes of data need to be compared within limited
time constraints, its usage to analyze and validate hypotheses has proved to
be beneficial. In recent years, there is a number of studies using Computer-
Assisted software to help annotating the Old Chinese scripts. To name a few,
Johann-Mattis List and Julien Baley have conducted extensive research on Old
and Middle Chinese, focusing on phonological reconstruction. To begin with,
to study historical Chinese qualitatively. Johann-Mattis List has applied the
Network theory to show relationship between words. The digitizing of the
Chinese sounds not only enhances the accessibility of ancient phonological
data but it also improves the speed of analyzing phonological evolution in
Old and Middle Chinese.
Example of digitalized data on https://digling.org/shijing/
Example of the relationship between languages proposed by the network
theory
Baley ( 2023) proposed the use of rhyme networks and graph
community detection to create automatic rhyme annotators for Chinese
poetry. His First step was to evaluate existing metrics and establish an
approach to assess annotation quality based on character-pair rhyme
judgments. Then he developed a research methodology and corpus which
created a sample that is both manageable for manual annotation and
statistically meaningful.
The evaluation of the automatic annotations using the new metric
demonstrated superior performance compared to the manual annotations.
This approach showed promising potential for near-perfect performance
across a corpus of 250,000 poems from the Tang and Song poetry
collections. This validation suggests that this corpus is a reliable source for
studying rhyming practices of those periods. It also saves approximately
1,300 hours of manual work.
Sample of the automatic annotations
Sample of vowels
The last part of this review will cover some interesting works related to
the excavated texts. One of the distinguished figures to be mentioned is
Nohara Masaki. In 2023, he investigated the reconstruction of the word for
"egg" in Old Chinese. By additional evidence which has been unearthed. It
suggests a more complex phonetic structure involving a consonant cluster on
Middle Chinese (MC) data . His theory was the word for "egg" in Old Chinese
is *rˤonʔ .
According to Xiéshēng Connections, the word for "egg" is related to
other words featuring a velar onset in Middle Chinese. Moreover,
Comparative Data from Proto-Min, Proto-Hmong-Mien, and Proto-Tai indicate
that the word for "egg" can be reconstructed as having the initial consonant
cluster *k.rˤ-. This aligns with the findings of previous researchers like T’ung-
ho Tung (1944) and Baxter & Sagart (2014). The theory is strengthened by
excavated documents such as oracle bone inscriptions and bamboo slips
supports the reconstruction of the phonetic element as *k-. For example,
characters with 䜌 luán as a phonetic element relate to words with *k- onsets.
An investigation into the evolution of the characters and their phonetic
elements reinforces the idea that characters like 卵 (luǎn) descend from an
earlier form with a consonant cluster, tracing back to a common origin.
Additionally, Dialect Evidence from various Min dialects has
substantiated a transition from *k.rˤ- in Old Chinese to different forms,
reflecting phonetic evolution that supports the notion of an initial consonant
cluster as well. Although Chinese Phonology has long been a field of interest
for scholars from various countries, there are still academic gaps and many
aspects that can be further explored.
Work Cited
André G. Haudricourt (1954) Comment Reconstruire Le Chinois Archaïque,,
351-364, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1954.11659532
Baley, Julien. (2023). Evaluating rhyme annotations for large corpora: Metrics
and data. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale. 52. 137-162.
10.1163/19606028-bja10032.
Baxter and Sagart. 2014. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford
University Press.
Hill, Nathan W. (2016) 'A refutation of Song's (2014) explanation of the 'stop
coda problem' in Old Chinese. International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 3
(2). pp. 270-281.
Jacques, Guillaume. (2016)" "How Many *-s Suffixes in Old Chinese?
"https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01566036/document
List, J.-M. (2024). Proceedings of multiple conferences, including LREC-
COLING, Society for Computation in Linguistics, and workshops on typology
and multilingual NLP. Retrieved on march 5, 2025 from ACL Anthology:
https://aclanthology.org/people/j/johann-mattis-list/
Nohara, Masaki. (2023). Old Chinese ‘egg’: More evidence for consonant
clusters. Language and Linguistics. 語言暨語言學.
Website
https://digling.org/shijing/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkZfZUAL9_E
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00793597v5/document
https://www.ctwx.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1054/2549.htm
https://hcommons.org/groups/east-asia-dh/
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2552845_4/component/file_2552844/
content
www.unibo.it/it/ateneo/amministrazione-trasparente/consulenti-e-
collaboratori/tabella-incarichi-scaduti/2022?id=36019&format=cv
www.semanticscholar.org/paper/%E2%80%9COld-Chinese-and-Friends
%E2%80%9D:-new-approaches-to-of-the-List-Starostin/
8f5896a046d1a2ff83191a69f522041da45d8c8f
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3149507_3/component/file_3149508/
content
NOTE
i
Started his career as a botanist, Haudricourt changed his research to Linguistics in 1945.
Stationed at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi first in 1948. Then, conducted his
experimental field trip in China in 1955.
ii
His affiliation is the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO). Jacques’s
research builds on the work of earlier of William Baxter and Laurent Sagart, who relied heavily on
internal reconstruction from Chinese texts. In terms of typology, the scope of his research is wider
as his data was from related languages such as Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic.
