Name: What "Ancient" Chinese Sounded Like - and how we know
Uploaded: 2018-03-04T10:23:56.000Z
Duration: 7 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

China has a long linguistic tradition. Did
you know Chinese scholars were digging into

old pronunciations centuries before Europeans
were reconstructing proto-languages? This

is the tale of how they uncovered their ancient
imperial language.

I struggle with Chinese pronunciation. I have
ever since the dictionary and cassettes my

Grandad once gave me for my birthday. But
lately I've been burying myself in hundreds

of pages of Chinese linguistic history, and
you know what? I'm in good company! Chinese

pronunciation puzzled experts in China for
a long, long time. Like this fellow.

A scholar reconstructing a language in the
1840s. You know the story by now, I've told

it before: compare a group of related languages,
classify them into a family tree, then reconstruct

Oh, but that's not the story this time! The
scholar is Chén Lǐ.

He's confronting a centuries-old problem.

How do you recover the sounds immortalized
in classical texts? How do you make the old

poems rhyme again? Here's the catch: you have
no recordings. No phonetic transcriptions.

Not even an alphabet. You're working with
characters, the Han characters we've talked

about before, each one standing for a one-syllable
word or word piece.

He scrutinizes the book in front of him. It
looks old, stodgy even,

1261 years earlier, a Mr Lù invited
8 friends over for a slumber party. They started

their evening with wine and conversation,
but, late in the night, the chit-chat turned

into a heated debate over the exact pronunciation
of old texts. The way people recite them in

North is wrong. No, they're wrong in the South.
Enough talk! Mr Lù inked his brush and outlined

He eventually filled five scrolls with over
11000 characters divided among the four Chinese

tones and subdivided into rhyming groups.
Then he broke down the sound of each character.

How? With two more characters! An upper character
to match the initial consonant, and a lower

character to rhyme with the final sounds,
including the tone. Take the character here,

meaning "east". It had the initial of /tək̚/
and the final of /ɦuŋ/, so using the reconstructed

pronunciation we'll talk about at the end,
it's /tuŋ/.

With this method, called fǎnqiè, you can
capture the sound of a syllable! Simple. And

clever. But it stopped short of giving an
overview of Chinese phonology. For that, rhymers

needed to take another step: organize this
info into tables.

The 12th century Rhyme Mirror is full of rime
tables. Here's one of them, the very first

The starting label gives the table number
– number one – and the kind of rhyme these

Along the top row are six articulation categories
for consonants, and down the side, the four

tones. The four rows per tone give more info
about the syllable, but their interpretation

So try this: find me a tongue sound, a lingual,
that's clear, meaning voiceless, and has the

first tone. So for this syllable type we've
pieced together something like /tuŋ/. And

then there's a partly-clear one, meaning aspirated
/h/, so kind of /tʰuŋ/? And this one is

dirty or muddy, which means a voiced sound,
so maybe /duŋ/?

Ok! What about all these circles though? What
do they mean? Syllable not found. So when

you look for a lip sound that's clear for
the first tone in this chart, you find nothing

like /puŋ/ recorded here. But there is a
/buŋ/, mugwort!

Just like that, you're excavating old pronunciations,
Chinese rhyme style.

And so confident scholars spent centuries
sounding out ancient Chinese syllables and

teaching that Chinese had exactly 36 initial
consonants.

But Chen Li's not convinced. He's combing
through old fǎnqiè, meticulously chaining

together initials of initials and finals of
finals. His linked sets revealed flaws. There

weren't 36 initials, there were 41. Five of
them needed to be split in two. But there's

more: the sounds in the rime tables are not
the sounds in the Qièyùn. These are

Later research will go on to show that even
the earlier stage itself is complicated. It's

a compromise between ancient literary dialects.
Thinking back to those late-night debates

over the north vs the south, that sounds about right.

But all this hard work merely left us with
categories. Boxes. Boxes for four tones. Boxes

for initials. Boxes for finals. Enough with
the guesswork. What are the precise sounds

In the early 1900s a Swede traveled to China
and dug into the old rimes and tables but

then added an important piece: the many living
varieties of Chinese. Karlgren was fascinated.

He created surveys and set out to document
them, and he used his results to fill out

How? Well, take that fourth tone (also called
the checked tone). Along the southern coast,

these checked tone syllables have a final
stop sound . So this old character, meaning

country, is /kuo˧˥/ in Mandarin, but in
Cantonese it's /kwok̚˧/. Who's older? Well,

look at the last three languages in Karlgren's
list of "dialects": Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese.

They use Sino-Xenic pronunciations, meaning
"China-foreign", basically the way the characters

sounded to them when they were imported. Their
words also have that k. It points back to

an ancient pronunciation for that character
that ended in a consonant, like /kwək̚˧/.

Linguists went on to refine these reconstructions
and to paint acoustic portraits of Ancient

Chinese that would sound downright foreign
in Mandarin today. They even revealed small

but important distinctions Karlgren missed,
like these pairs of chóngniǔ.

And they taught me one last thing while I
was over here struggling to understand Chinese

pronunciation. It's not a single language
called Ancient Chinese.

No, it's a period in linguistic history called Middle Chinese.

"Middle"... because there's an even older

language to uncover, a thousand years older
still.

Maybe one day we'll rhyme our way into Old
Chinese. Until then, stick around and subscribe