Thoughts on the Names of the Thirty(-six) Rime Table Initials

Abstract

Closely associated with the Chinese rime table (Chin. děngyùntú 等韻圖) tradition is an ordered list of syllables, referred to in Chinese as the Sānshíliù zìmŭ 三十六字母. As this term indicates, there are thirty-six members in the usually cited full list. A shorter version, found in the so-called Shǒuwēn 守溫 Fragments from Dunhuang, has only thirty members (cf. Coblin 2006a). In addition to the copies of the list incorporated into the various tables themselves, several “disembodied” lists, perhaps copybook exercises of some sort, have also been found in the broader corpus of Chinese Dunhuang texts (Coblin 2006b: 146). The syllable initial classes for which the characters in the rime tables serve as names are basic componential elements in the field of traditional Chinese historical phonology and as such have been subject to intense scrutiny for nearly 1000 years. On the other hand, the actual names themselves have attracted little attention. It has been noted that each naming syllable denoted by the characters in the list embodies the particular medieval syllable initial of the sound class for which it stands in the tables. But beyond this the question of how these particular syllables, rather than all other available ones, were selected, seems to have aroused scant interest among philologists and sinolinguists. It is, accordingly, this question that will be the topic of the present paper.