Classical Chinese Primer
Pronunciation

The sounds of early Chinese are not firmly known. Here instead, for reasons given in the Introduction, is an inventory of the sounds of Peking Mandarin. This is the least ancient of modern Chinese languages, but for reasons which do not bear close examination, it is the one conventionally used to read classical texts in. To spell those sounds, we use the conventions of the Common Alphabetic transcription. Note that "g" is the American English "g," which compared to Spanish is an "unvoiced" but also "unaspirated" stop; so also in the other consonant series.

Consonants

Labial: b-, p-, m-, f- w-, hw- ["when"]
Dental: d-, t-, n-, l-, s-
Palatalized [before medial -y-]: jy-, chy-, sy-, y- [no "hy-" parallel to "hw-" above]
Retroflex [backed; no medial -y-]: j-, ch-, sh-, r-
Velar: g-, k-, ng- [does not occur initially], h- [fricative rather than purely oral]

Medials

For the nature of medial -y-, contrast English "moon" (no medial) and "music" (medial -y-). The others are analogous; -yw- is the medial counterpart of the "umlaut u" vowel.

-y-, -w-, -yw-

It should be emphasized that the "medials" are consonantal rather than vocalic in nature, though they are often transcribed as vowels, even in linguistic fieldwork. Each Mandarin syllable has only one syllabic nucleus. Whether that was equally true of earlier periods is an ongoing question, which we won't here attempt to solve.

Vowels

(Most values are "as in Italian")

High: i ["peat"], u ["boot"], w ["umlaut u;" always after y-]
*Allophones: i [as in "pit"] and u [as in "put"] are not phonemically contrastive
Mid: e ["get"], v ["gut," sound of "uh" or Sanskrit "short a"), o ["gonna"]
Low: ae ["cat"], a [the oe of "ought" is not present in the system]
Anomalous: -ar
Glides: ei, ai, ou, au [the first element has the accent, and carries the tone]

The actual height of a vowel can be influenced by the tone of the syllable. High tone tends to raise the position of the vowel, and low tone tends to lower it. Thus we hear "ar" in the low tone, but the same syllable pronounced in a high tone tends toward "vr." The transcriptions given here are thus a compromise between these variants.

Syllabic Finals

-i, -u (as vowel glides)
-n, -ng [the expected -m once existed, but was lost in the 14c]

The missing -m is still present in Cantonese. So are the former stop finals -p, -t, and -k. If it were the habit to use Cantonese rather than Mandarin as a classroom pronunciation standard, students of classical Chinese would be, phonetically speaking, about 1,000 years closer to their goal. The powers that be (the ones that determine the location of dynastic capitals) have decreed otherwise, and that is the end of that conversation.

Syllabic Combinations

Not all possible combinations of initials and finals actually occur. Apart from tone, there are a little more than 400 different syllables in Standard Dictionary Mandarin.

Tones

There are four, and in print they are indicated this way:

High [shown by a level line above the vowel],
Rising, as in má "hemp,"
Low [actually low falling followed by low rising], and
Falling, as in mà "berate"

There is also a neutral tone, which occurs on unstressed syllables. Not all the 400 basic syllables appear in all four tones. For instance, any voiced initial in a word in the old "level" (ping) tone produces a Mandarin rising tone, and prohibits a Mandarin high tone. One outcome is that no Mandarin syllable beginning with (voiced) l, m, or n can have a high tone.

Tones are not normally transcribed on the Internet, since the diacritics needed as tonemarks are not systematically available. On these pages, as in standard E-mail usage, a conventional postposed numeral replaces the tonemark. If we suggest the actual tone contours by referring to a system of 5 pitches, 5 being the highest, the conventional numerals and their contours are:

an1 = "an" in the high (level) tone (55)
an2 = "an" in the (high) rising tone (45)
an3 = "an in the low tone (213)
an4 = "an" in the falling tone (52)

Tones can change on syllables in conjunction; this is called tone sandhi. Details are not given here. Apart from word tone, sentence intonation also exists. It is essentially superimposed on the intrinsic word contours. Part of the work of intonation contours in English is carried in Chinese by toneless sentence-final particles which indicate such nuances as hesitation, inquiry, or impatience. Some English intonation contours resemble Mandarin word tones:

[high]: "well . . . " (hesitation: well55 . . .)
[rising]: "me??" (inquiry: me45 or mé?)
[low]: not a standard device of English intonation
[falling]: "now!!" (impatience: now52 or nòw!).

A defect of most published descriptions of Chinese sounds is that they attempt to justify a particular spelling rather than describing the sounds. The above descriptions, to the best of our ability, are reasonably neutral.

Classical Chinese Primer is Copyright © 2000- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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