Phonological Features of Yuan Colloquial Chinese as Seen in Rashid al-Din's History of China

Abstract

Rashid al-Din (1247-1318)'s History of China, written in Persian, contains the names of the dynasties, and of kings and emperors, from prehistoric legends up to the Yuan dynasty. The phonetic transcription of these proper names is an important piece of information for us to understand the Chinese phonology of the Yuan dynasty. in order to correctly understand the phonological features of old Mandarin the possible phonological contrasts that can be represented in the Persian script are examined. it is shown that the Persian transcriptions did not create new letters for Chinese sounds. Thus all the phonological categories of Chinese are only represented by the available Persian letters. After analyzing these transcriptions, this article shows that although many phonological distinctions of old Mandarin are not very well represented in this material, there are enough phonological features to identify the underlying phonological system, which is unambiguously Mandarin.