Historical Chinese Phonology - From Old Chinese To Early Middle Chinese

From Old Chinese To Early Middle Chinese

There are disagreements over exactly what the Old Chinese (OC) syllable looked like. The following is an approximate consensus, based on the system of William Baxter and (earlier) Li Fang-Kuei:

  1. A syllable consisted of an initial consonant, an optional medial glide /r/ (but no /j/ or /w/), a main vowel, an optional final (coda) consonant, and an optional post-final consonant /s/ or /ʔ/. There were also various pre-initial consonants. (In recent systems, Baxter also constructs a distinction between "tightly bound" pre-initials /C-/ and "loosely bound" pre-initials /Cə/. The tightly-bound pre-initials interact in complex ways with the initial to produce EMC initials, but the loosely-bound pre-initials mostly just disappear. Their presence, however, is revealed by the use of a "phonetic complement" with the corresponding tightly-bound pre-initial in their character, and sometimes by early borrowings into other languages, especially Hmong–Mien languages and Tai languages.) Pre-initial and post-final consonants were frequently used in morphological derivation.
  2. There was no MC-style tone, but there was a distinction of some sort between type-A and type-B syllables. Depending on the linguist, the distinction is variously thought to reflect either presence or absence of prefixes, an accentual or length distinction on the main vowel, or some sort of register distinction (e.g. pharyngealization of the initial consonant in type-A syllables). These different reconstructions may not be mutually exclusive (e.g. an earlier prefix distinction may have developed into a later register distinction).
  3. Compared with EMC, there were no palatal or retroflex consonants, but there were labiovelar consonants (e.g. /kʷ/). Baxter also reconstructs voiceless resonants, e.g. /hm/, /hn/.
  4. There were on the order of six main vowels: /a/, /i/, /e/, /o/, /u/, /ə/ (or /ɨ/).
  5. The system of final (coda) consonants was similar to EMC; however, there was no /wŋ/. Baxter also reconstructs final /r/, later becoming /n/.

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