The origin of Chinese tones

The origin of Chinese tones

International Symposium on "Tone languages in the world"

December 10-12, 1998

Tokyo

The origin of Chinese tones

by

Laurent Sagart

CRLAO, EHESS

URA 1025 du CNRS

Paris, France

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1. INTRODUCTION

The long literary tradition of Chinese opens for us a window on the early history of the language. A continuous tradition of old literary texts, the earliest of which date from the early years of the 1st millennium BCE, have been handed down to us more or less intact; in addition, epigraphy provides us with an increasingly large corpus of old inscriptions: oracular inscriptions on shells and bones, known as Jiaguwen 甲骨文, and dating from the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, as well as inscriptions on bronze vessels (Jinwen 金文) dating from the 1st millennium BCE. That these texts and inscriptions provide us with ample opportunities to study the grammar and lexicon of the language is self-evident: but, given the non-alphabetic nature of the Chinese script, it may be necessary here to say a few words of the methods of Old Chinese reconstruction in the phonological domain.

Only limited attempts at applying the comparative method to the pronunciation of earlier stages of Chinese have so far been made: were a systematic reconstructive effort to be mounted on the basis of the diversity found in modern Chinese dialects, it would probably not lead to stages of the language nearly as old as the earliest texts and inscriptions: due to widespread language leveling in the North, most of the linguistic diversity is now found in southeast China, an area not settled by Chinese speakers before (and often much later than) the second century BCE.

The method of Old Chinese reconstruction is sui generis: it makes use of two independent, yet mutually supporting bodies of data: the poetic rhyme sequences in the Shi Jing 詩經 (Book of Odes), a compilation dating to the middle of the first millennium BCE, but known to us in a version crystallized towards the end of the 3rd century BCE; and the phonetic element in the Chinese script, which reflects the pronunciation of Chinese also in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. The basic principle (same phonetic graph in the script > same rhyme in the Odes) relating these two bodies of data was discovered by the eminent Chinese philologist Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735-1815).

The origin of Chinese tones

A more recent stage of Chinese, corresponding to the reading pronunciation of the educated class in Nanjing towards the end of the 6th century CE, has been the target of reconstructive efforts of several scholars. This is called Early Middle Chinese: it is a mere sound system, rather than a full language. Its reconstruction relies on the systematic indications of pronunciation in the dictionary Qie Yun, compiled between 580 and 600 by Lu Fayan 陸法言 with the aid of other scholars.

Needless to say, reconstructed Early Middle Chinese is an essential ingredient in establishing the sounds of Old Chinese. Reconstructed OC phonology must then make sense of the rhymes in the book of Odes and the phonetics in the Chinese script, while having the look of a natural language, and evolving into Early Middle Chinese according to natural sound changes. Additional bodies of data are used to further constrain the exercise: early Chinese loan-words into neighboring languages; Chinese transcriptions of foreign personal names and place names; sound glosses by Chinese commentators, especially in the late Han period (1st and second centuries CE); and, last but not least, Chinese word families (since OC was richer than Modern Chinese in derivational morphology).

The stage being set, we now turn to the question of the origins of Chinese tones. There is growing agreement among scholars on what the most likely tonogenetic scenario is in Chinese. In this paper I will adopt a narrative format and recount the story of how that scenario was arrived at. It will be necessary first to present briefly the situation in modern dialects and in Early Middle Chinese (EMC)

2. Tones in modern Chinese dialects

Most modern Chinese dialects have between 3 and 10 contrastive tones. There exists a rough cline between the northern and western dialects, which generally have 3-5 tones, and the south-eastern dialects which have around 6-10. From this point of view, Chinese dialects provide typological a transition between the nontonal Tungusic, Mongolian and Turkic languages in the north and the tone-rich languages of the Miao-Yao and Kam-Tai groups to the south.

Chinese tones are complex suprasegmental events distinguishing (otherwise) homophonous syllables, which are often –but not always– meaning-bearing units, or morphemes. Thus a four-fold tonal contrast in Modern Standard Chinese is the following 5in these examples, subscript numerals are tone marks):

ma1 ‘mother’

ma2 ‘hemp’

ma3 ‘horse’

ma4 ‘to scold’

At the phonetic level, Chinese tones are defined by characteristic evolutions of pitch and amplitude, sometimes accompanied by specific voice qualities such as breathiness, creak, whisper or ventricular voice. The tones of Beijing were shown by Howie (1974) to be a

property of the syllable rhyme (that is, the main vowel and any following segment) rather than of the final (the rhyme plus a preceding semivowel) or of the entire voiced part of a syllable.

The origin of Chinese tones

A phonetic notation for the pitch component of Chinese tones devised by Y.R. Chao (1930) is commonly used in the Chinese literature on tone. It consists of a 5-degree scale dividing an ideal speaker’s voice range, from 1-low to 5-high. Unidirectional tones –level, …… 此处隐藏：28120字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……