Chinese Phonology Research Articles

The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy By John DeFrancis (review)

690LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3 (1986) REFERENCES Berman, Ruth A. 1978. Modern Hebrew structure. Tel-Aviv: University Publishing Projects. Georgiev, Vladimir I. 1981. Introduction to the history of the Indo-European languages . Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Gumowski, Marian. 1975. Hebräische Münzen im mittelalterlichen Polen. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. Heyd, Uriel. 1954. Language reform in modern Turkey. Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1964. The term Canaan in Medieval Europe. For Max Weinreich on his seventieth birthday: Studies in Jewish languages, literature and society, 147-72. The Hague: Mouton. Kahane, Henry and Renée. 1970. Abendland und Byzanz: Literatur und Sprache. Reallexikon der Byzantinistik, ed. by Peter Wirth, 1:4, col. 345-416. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Krauss, Samuel. 1898. Griechische und lateinische Lehnwörter im Talmud, Midrasch und Targum, 1-2. Berlin: S. Calvary. Massariello Merzagora, Giovanna. 1980. La parlata giudeo-piemontese. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 65.105-36. Pritsak, Omeljan. 1984. Na perexresti dvox tysjaöolit'. Suöasnist' 1/2.80-90. Wexler, Paul. 1981. The terms for 'synagogue' in Hebrew and Jewish languages: Explorations in historical Jewish interlinguistics. Revue des Études Juives 140:1/ 2.101-38. Wolf, Siegmund A. 1956. Wörterbuch des Rotwelschen. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. [Received 25 November 1985.] The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy. By John DeFrancis. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984. Pp. x, 330. $20.00. Reviewed by Matthew Y. Chen, University of California, San Diego If any readers are lured by the title of this book to expect detailed discussion of the syntax, semantics, or phonology of Chinese, they will be disappointed: this 300-page, handsomely produced work is devoted to the subject of Chinese characters. A more descriptive, if less tantalizing, title would have been 'The Chinese writing system: Fact and fantasy.' The volume consists of four parts: Part I (Chaps. 1-3) defines such terms as 'idiolect', 'dialect', 'regionalect', and 'language', and provides a sketch of spoken Chinese. Part II (Chaps. 4-7) forms the core of the book, and focuses on two questions: 'How do Chinese characters represent sounds?' (Chap. 5), and 'How do Chinese characters convey meaning?' (Chap. 7). In Part III (Chaps. 8-13), DeFrancis mounts an 'Entmythologisierung' campaign against some cherished notions—e.g. that Chinese characters are primarily 'ideographic ', i.e. graphic representation of meaning rather than sound (Chap. 8); that written Chinese serves as an ideal vehicle of communication among the speakers of diverse dialects/languages (including Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean), much as Latin once played the role of 'lingua franca' in the entire Western world (Chap. 9); that Chinese is monosyllabic (Chap. 11); and that it REVIEWS691 is indispensable for the preservation of national unity (Chap. 12). The book closes with Part IV (Chaps. 14-15) on speech and writing reforms, and an impassioned plea for Pinyin (or some such scheme of romanization eventually to supplant what DeF considers as an inefficient and chaotic, if not utterly irrational, writing system that has shackled the Chinese mind for centuries. DeF, best known for his extremely popular series oftextbooks used by many students of the Chinese language in the US, has succeeded to a remarkable degree in rousing readers' curiosity and in challenging them to look at Chinese writing in a refreshingly new, often unconventional, and sometimes controversial fashion. He has a nimble mind and a vivid imagination, and excels in inventing felicitious examples to illustrate his point. For instance, he compares 'phonetic compounding' to a 'rebus' puzzle (p. 172)—which is entirely appropriate and insightful, if a trifle irreverent. The introductory section entitled 'The Singlish affair' is a classic piece of imaginative writing, as entertaining as it is instructive. In what follows, I will focus on the two core questions: how do Chinese characters represent sound and meaning, respectively? The answers have momentous practical consequences. Consider beguiling examples such as these: (1)mù i- from ^ 'tree' (2)ri? from o 'sun (3)döng %_ from ^ + s 'east' (tree silhouetted against the rising sun) Used repeatedly in textbooks and popular literature on Chinese script, such examples help to perpetuate the widespread misconception that Chinese characters are either stylized drawings of concrete objects ('tree', 'sun'), or symbolic representations of abstract...

Chinese Phonology of the Wei-Chin Period: Reconstruction of the Finals as Reflected in Poetry

Chinese Phonology of the Wei-Chin Period: Reconstruction of the Finals as Reflected in Poetry

Chain shifts in chinese historical phonology : problems of motivation and functionality.

Chain shifts in chinese historical phonology : problems of motivation and functionality.

From Value to Fact: The Emergence of Phonology as a Precise Discipline in Late Imperial China

The emergence of phonology as a key discipline during the Ch'ing dynasty was closely tied to the triumph of precise empirical techniques of philological analysis, championed by participants in the evidential research movement, over Neo-Confucian moral philosophy. In phonology, such applications stressed the reconstruction of archaic finals through an examination of ancient rhyme schemes. In the late eighteenth century, significant steps were taken to investigate archaic initials as well. Such pioneering studies established the foundations of modern Chinese linguistics and at the same time provided Western linguists with much of the necessary data and tools needed to refine earlier reconstructions of ancient Chinese phonology.

Historical Romance morphology By James M. Anderson and Bernard Rochet (review)

424LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) In an example like 3 (not Ladd's), an analysis of accent concentrating on contrast would have little explanation regarding what to actually contrasts with: d (3) We thought about what we could o o to but then we realized there was nothing do. The accent on to is not so much an accent which properly belongs to the word to, but rather to the phrase to do; however, do is anaphorically de-accented, and the accent has no place to go but onto the to. Ladd's discussion is much more intricate than this simple example might suggest, and quite interesting. In conclusion, Ladd's book contains many extended and thoughtful discussions of issues that should be faced more frequently than they are these days. It definitely should be read. REFERENCES Goldsmith, John. 1976. Autosegmental phonology. MIT dissertation. [Published, New York: Garland Press, 1979.] Ladd, D. Robert. 1978. Stylized intonation. Lg. 54.517-40. Leben, William. 1976. The tones in English intonation. Linguistic Analysis 2.69-107. Liberman, Mark. 1975. The intonational system of English. MIT dissertation. [Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club.] Walton, A. Ronald. 1976. Syllable and tone in Chinese. Cornell University dissertation. Yip, Moira. 1980. The tonal phonology of Chinese. MIT dissertation. [Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club.] [Received 23 July 1981.] Historical Romance morphology. By James M. Anderson and Bernard Rochet. Ann Arbor: Published for the University of Calgary by University Microfilms International, 1979. Pp. 395. $20.00. Reviewed by Suzanne Fleischman, University of California, Berkeley It has been a number of years since anyone has undertaken to write a new, genuinely comparative, historical morphology of Romance. Among 'classics' of the genre, the first (1836-44) was appropriately from the pen of the founder of Romance linguistics, Friedrich Diez, followed a half century or so later by Meyer-Lübke's celebrated Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (1890-1902)— which, though bearing the same title as its predecessor, reflects very solidly the Neogrammarian ideology in vogue during the latter part of the century. These monuments of 19th century philology in the German tradition continue to be cited today, if perhaps more commonly in French translation. The early 20th century saw the appearance of the first major comparative venture written in a Romance tongue, Bourciez's Eléments de linguistique romane (1910), which for all its defects is now in a fifth edition (1967)—which serves as the principal information source for the volume being reviewed here. Two more enterprises deserve mention in this brief history of the tradition in which the REVIEWS425 A&R volume is set: Tagliavini's Le origini délie lingue neolatine (1949) and Lausberg's Romanische Sprachwissenschaft (1962-63), both now available in Spanish translation, and both more up-to-date and more rigorous than Bourciez .1 It should be noted that all the above in effect go beyond the confines of historical morphology and are properly classed as historical grammars, though three of the five works (Diez, Meyer-Lübke, Lausberg) contain a volume devoted entirely to morphological evolution. In view of this spectrum of available and, on the whole, very respectable historical morphologies, one might legitimately ask: Why yet another one? What do A&R have to offer that their predecessors did not? The answer is: relatively little, inasmuch as their material derives wholly from other sources, and they offer nothing really innovative in theory or methodology. Yet they do bring together here, for the first time in English and in a relatively nontechnical presentation, extensive data from five 'major' Romance speech areas, and they organize these data so as to maximally facilitate cross-language comparison . There is clearly something to be said for such an undertaking, ifcarried out successfully; and A&R have achieved a measure of success. The major strength of the book lies in making available a vast array of data drawn from five continental Romance standards: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Rumanian. The book is thus ideal in principle for anyone wishing to compare or contrast the various Romance speech areas with respect to a particular formation or category of grammar. The difficulty, however, is that the reader not already thoroughly conversant with Romance historical grammar...

Some notes on Chinese historical phonology

Some notes on Chinese historical phonology

Old Chinese Phonology

(Translator's note: The following excerpt is taken from S. E. Yakhontov's short book Drevneki tajskij Jazyk (Moscow, 1965). This work of Yakhorrtov is a concise and quite general description of his reconstruction of Old Chinese, which he broadly de fines as the language from the first inscriptions down to that of the fourth century A.D. He subdi vides this rather long period in the following way: Pre-Classical period XIII-VI c. B.C. Classical period V c. B.C. II c. A.D. Late Old Chinese III-IV c. A.D.

The analysis of vowel systems

Abstract The method of analysing vowel systems that will be presented in this article has been developed in connection with studies of Chinese historical phonology and related investigations of other East Asian languages. In part it derives from an interpretation of traditional Chinese “rhyme table” phonology and is a way of translating this into alphabetic notation. Beyond this, however, it has proved very useful in analysing linguistic change and it suggests a kind of feature analysis of vowels that may have a much wider application.

DOC, 1971: A Chinese dialect dictionary on computer

DOC (Dictionary on Computer) is a computerized dictionary of Chinese dialects under the direction of William S-Y. Wang of the Phonology Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley.1 It is a data base for research into the nature of sound change in general, and in particular into the details of Chinese historical phonology. Started in the summer of 1966, the project became fully operational a year later and is still being expanded, its progress is traced in Lyovin (1968), Wang (1970), and Streeter (1971). In addition to Berkeley, DOC is currently operational at the University of Illinois under the direction of Chin-chuan Cheng, and at the University of Stockholm, where Dr. Wang is a guest professor for the academic year 1971-72. Inquiries concerning the availability of a data tape should be addressed to Dr. Wang at Berkeley. The computer facilities described in the present article are those of the mother project at Berkeley.

Hanoi dorsal finals

Hanoi Vietnamese, although not apparently genetically related to Chinese, is a language phonologically of the Chinese type; in the terminology of Hockett (1955, 60–1, 129), Hanoi Vietnamese phonology constitutes a system without interludes, with syllable juncture, and with tones as ICs of syllables. Hanoi phonology is in fact rather close to the phonology of Middle Chinese (Karlgren's ‘Ancient Chinese’, cf. Pulleyblank, 1962, 64), the source, via the dialect of Chinese called ‘Sino-Vietnamese’ (Haudricourt, 1954, 79), of the majority of Vietnamese lexical items.

Umlaut in Tibetan Numerals

In paper entitled The significance for comparative grammar of some ablauts in the Tibetan number-system, published in the 1955 volume of this journal, Roy Andrew Miller has attempted a correlation of anomalies in the number-system of proto-Tibetan, as rellected in variety of the piesent-day dialects, with features in the phonology of ancient Chinese, thereby hoping to be able to introduce some small order into the vague and contradictory state of these (=Sino-Tibetan) compaiisons by the treatment.. .of carefully limited problems in teims of even artificially restricted data.