Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese is the historical variety of the Chinese language recorded in the Qieyun rime dictionary and its later revisions during the Tang dynasty and Song dynasty. It represents a crucial stage in the evolution of the Sinitic languages, serving as the primary source for reconstructing the phonology of Old Chinese and as the ancestral system from which most modern Chinese dialects diverged. The systematic study of its structure, primarily through medieval rhyme tables like the Yunjing, has been fundamental to Chinese historical linguistics.

Historical context and development

The codification of Middle Chinese is primarily attributed to the scholar Lu Fayan, who compiled the Qieyun in 601 during the Sui dynasty, synthesizing the reading traditions of major literary centers like Chang'an, Luoyang, and Jinling. This work was later revised and expanded under imperial patronage, leading to the Guangyun and Jiyun dictionaries in the Song dynasty. The period of Middle Chinese spans from the late Northern and Southern dynasties through the Tang dynasty, a time of significant cultural consolidation and literary flourishing exemplified by poets like Du Fu and Li Bai. The standard reflected in these texts was not a spoken vernacular but a prestigious literary koine used for reciting classical texts and composing regulated verse, which exerted immense influence across East Asia, including Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Phonology

The phonological system of Middle Chinese is characterized by a complex structure of initials, finals, and tones, meticulously analyzed in later Song dynasty rhyme tables like the Yunjing and Qiyin lüe. The system featured a three-way contrast among stop and affricate initials (voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and voiced), a rich set of sibilants, and a vocalic system that distinguished between "open" and "closed" finals. It operated with a four-tone system—Level, Rising, Departing, and Entering—with the Entering tone being checked by final stop consonants (-p, -t, -k). Scholars like Bernhard Karlgren and later Edwin G. Pulleyblank used this data to propose detailed reconstructions, revealing relationships with contemporaneous transcriptions of Sanskrit and other foreign terms in works like the Heart Sutra.

Writing systems

Middle Chinese was written using the Chinese characters inherited from Old Chinese, with its pronunciation encoded through the fanqie method in dictionaries like the Qieyun. This system used two characters to spell the pronunciation of a third, indicating its initial and final respectively. The primary textual sources for its study are the aforementioned rime dictionaries and the later rime tables, which organized syllables in a tabular format. While the Clerical script had evolved into Regular script by this period, the writing system itself did not directly represent phonological changes; instead, evidence comes from specialized phonetic compilations, transcriptions of Buddhist texts from the Tang dynasty, and early evidence of Phags-pa script usage under the Yuan dynasty.

Relationship to modern varieties

The modern Sinitic languages are largely descended from Middle Chinese, with different varieties preserving or merging various features of the ancestral system. For instance, the Cantonese language and some dialects of Minnan (like Hokkien) retain the full set of final stop consonants and the three-way initial distinction, while Mandarin Chinese has undergone significant simplification, losing the voiced initials and the Entering tone. The division system evident in the rhyme tables explains major splits in vowel development between groups like Northern Chinese and Wu Chinese. Comparative study of modern dialects in Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and Suzhou provides critical data for verifying reconstructions and understanding the divergent evolution that followed the Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty.

Reconstruction and scholarship

The modern reconstruction of Middle Chinese began with the pioneering work of Bernhard Karlgren, whose system was published in his *Études sur la phonologie chinoise*. Subsequent scholars, including Wang Li, Edwin G. Pulleyblank, William H. Baxter, and David R. Branner, have refined the model using broader dialect evidence and improved understanding of the rime tables. Key debates center on the exact phonetic values of the "divisions," the nature of the so-called "chongniu" contrasts, and the reconstruction of the vowel system. This scholarly tradition, bridging Chinese philology and Western historical linguistics, relies on sources like the Seal script forms for clues to earlier stages and continues to inform the study of Sino-Tibetan languages and Tang dynasty literature.

Category:Chinese language Category:Historical languages Category:Sinitic languages