Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 6
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2020
Print publication year:
2020
Online ISBN:
9781316476925

Book description

The phonological history of Chinese can be traced back to two main traditions: one starting with the Qieyun of 601, and the other starting with the Zhongyuan Yinyun of 1324. The former marks the beginning of Middle Chinese, and the latter marks the beginning of Old Mandarin. Both of these systems, as well as reconstructed Old Chinese, should be understood as ideal phonological standards and composite in nature. Until modern times, phonological standards were never based strictly on the phonology of a single dialect. This book provides the first study written in English, of the phonological history of Chinese. It provides information about the standard phonological systems for each of the language's major historical periods, drawing on a range of historical materials such as dictionaries, rhyming tables and poetry, and is the reference book for understanding the key developments in the Chinese sound system.

Reviews

'This volume presents a balanced account of what is currently known about the phonological history of Chinese and opens a window for future work in the area with an emphasis on language contact. Much fruitful fundamental research lies ahead! Very few languages in the world offer the kind of time depth and rich cultural history that is presented in this volume. It is a great pleasure for me to highly recommend the volume, not only to readers in linguistics, but to all readers who are interested in a fascinating chapter of human history.'

William S-Y. Wang - Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.