Rime Table - Structure

Structure

In the medieval rime dictionaries, characters were organized into rhyme groups (yùn 韵), with 193 groups in the Qieyun, growing to 206 in the Guangyun. The order of the rhyme groups within each tone implies a correspondence between rhyme groups across the four tones. Thus for each rhyme group with an -m, -n or -ng coda in the level tone there are typically corresponding rhyme groups with the same coda in the rising and departing tones, and a corresponding rhyme group in the entering tone with a -p, -t or -k coda respectively. In contrast, syllables with vocalic codas typically had corresponding rhyme groups only in the level, rising and departing tones. There were also four departing tone rhyme groups with -j codas that had no counterparts in the other tones.

The rime tables were solely concerned with the pronunciation of syllables of these rime dictionaries, and do not contain dictionary-like material such as definitions. Similarly, where a group of characters are recorded as homophones in the rime dictionaries, typically only one will occur in a rime table. A rime table book presents these distinct syllables in a number of tabular charts, each devoted to one or more sets of parallel rhyme groups across the tones.

The preface to Qieyun indicates that it represented a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations from the late Southern and Northern Dynasties period. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions it recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere. The rime tables were compiled centuries later in the time of a new standard, and many of the distinctions in the Qieyun would have been meaningless to the compilers. Edwin Pulleyblank has argued that the tables contain enough evidence to reconstruct the speech of that later period, which he calls this language Late Middle Chinese in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the Qieyun, and argues that it was the standard speech of the imperial capital Chang'an in the late Tang dynasty. His reconstruction accounts for most of the distinctions in modern varieties of Chinese (except Min), as well as layers of Chinese loanwords, such as the Kan-on layer of Sino-Japanese vocabulary.