Classical Chinese Primer
Historical PronunciationAs was explained on the Pronunciation page, for social reasons we are using Mandarin readings of the Lesson characters. But these are very different from the ancient sounds. If we knew the ancient sounds exactly, we would use them, but the reconstruction of those sounds is still a scholarly work in progress. Here are some topics relevant to this general problem.
A Practical ExpedientWhat we have done, until an assured Warring States phonology is available to the ordinary reader, is to provide hints of earlier initial and final consonants in the Dictionary entries. Thus, in the Dictionary, you will find lv4 "happy," and at the end of that definition, the reminder [-k], meaning that the word used to have a final -k sound. This phonetic information is derived from a source differing only slightly from the Chye-ywn Jr-jang Tu (CJT) phonetic tables of 1083; see the introduction on our CJT Equivalents page.
We strongly advise that students be at least aware of these early features, and make them a part of daily working consciousness.
RhymeAs early as Lesson 2, lines 2-3, we have situations for which a knowledge of WS period rhymes would be very handy. In the absence of that knowledge, we can at least be alert for evidences that a rhyme exists, and use what we know about historical pronunciation to verify it.
Some translators represent rhymed text by printing it in separate lines, "as poetry," rather than run together as a block of prose. That convention is to be encouraged.
StressStress is not directly known, in our period, but the following are fairly certain:
- (1) Particles (Z) are weakly stressed,
- (2) most content-bearing words are normally stressed, and
- (3) contrastive words are extra stressed for special emphasis.
- (4) Of two content-bearing words making up a phrase, the element carrying the greater information content has the greater relative stress.
Thus, a noun carries more information than a pronoun - there are more different things it could be and still make sense in the sentence. So the choice from that larger pool of options tells you more, and thus carries more information. Similarly, an noun object will normally carry more information (and be a little more strongly stressed) than the verb it follows, and an adjective (Q) more than the noun it precedes (H).
Those are the tendencies. You are fairly safe in relying on them when pronouncing the material. If you have a live model for pronouncing a given sentence, follow it instead.
In your own notes, whether in characters or romanization, you can mark extra stress by underlining a syllable, and reduced stress by parenthesizing a syllable. We haven't added these complications in the Text transcriptions, since those symbols there have other meanings. But we can recommend them for personal use. All grammar conventions suggested in these Lessons are meant to be easy to write into a character text you are reading, or to incorporate into a romanized transcription you may make.
Sometimes an unstressed word will partly vanish phonetically, and its remaining sound will be contracted into the adjacent word. This often happens with negative prefixes. Thus the rhetorical question "why not . . ." (hv2 bu4-) can easily appear phonetically as hv2 b'- (losing the vowel of bu-). From that, the next step is the contraction of the b- (in the form -p) with the hv, which gives something like "hvp2." This contracted form can still be written by a scribe with the two characters for hv2 bu-, in which case there is no indication that any contraction has occurred. Or, it can be written with a borrowed character for a word now pronounced "hv2" but in earlier times more nearly "hvp2." Note that when the borrowed character is used for a two-character contraction, it would obviously be wrong to philosophize from the written components of that single character (which presently look like "go" over "dish") about the meaning of the word in this context. The character has simply been commandeered as a sound notation. The meaning for which it may originally have been devised is completely irrelevant.
These contractions are a typical Warring States phenomenon. They don't seem to occur in the more ancient language, and the preposed-pronoun rule that brought negative prefixes into conjunction with those objects (the source of many contractions) seems not to obtain in Han.
Classical Chinese Primer is Copyright © 2000- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
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