Le destin des obstruantes sonores du chinois ancien dans les dialectes Min

Abstract

The voiced obstruent initials of Aneient Chinese have both (voiceless) aspirated and unaspirated reflexes in Min and other Chinese dialects , without any apparent conditioning factor. It is argued that such double developments do not reflect the existence in Proto-Min of two or three series of voiced obstruents (Norman 1973) - a reconstruction unsupported by other Chinese dialects and Sino-tibetan languages - but are the result of the interference with the devoicing process of a synchronie sandhi rule prohibiting breathy phonation to occur in stressed syllables. Proto-Min was presumably a language with phrase-final stress, like modern Min dialects. It is shown (tables 5 & 6) that words which do not occur phrase- finally , such as transitive verbs and nouns determining other nouns, are likely to have an aspirated initial, while words that occur phrase-finally are likely to have an unaspirated initial in Amoy. Family names, which carry strong stress regardless of their position, generally have unaspirated initials (Table 4). The sandhi rule proposed for Proto-Min is observed in two recently described dialects : Chongming (Zhang 1979) and Longsheng Ling (Wang 1979).