Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation: In Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin

497 Pages·1991·18.59 MB·English

by  Edwin G. Pulleyblank

LEXICON OF RECONSTRUCTED PRONUNCIATION IN
EARLY MIDDLE CHINESE, LATE MIDDLE CHINESE,
AND EARLY MANDARIN
Known for his pioneering work in Chinese historical phonetics, Edwin
Pulleyblank has compiled this Lexicon to present in convenient dictionary
form the result of his researches on the phonology of Middle Chinese and
its evolution to Mandarin.
The Lexicon complements Pulleyblank's earlier book, Middle Chinese,
by providing reconstructed pronunciation for approximately 8,000 Chi-
nese characters at three historical stages. Early Middle Chinese is the
language of the Qieyun rhyme dictionary of A.D. 601, which codified the
standard literary language of both North and South China, the preceding
period of division. Pulleyblank's reconstruction is a thorough reworking
of that of Bernhard Karlgren, completed in the twenties, and in some
respects differs radically from it. Late Middle Chinese is the standard
language of the High Tang Dynasty, based on the dialect of the capital,
Chang'an. It has not been reconstructed previously as a separate stage but
is of special importance, since it is the ancestor of most modern dialects.
Early Mandarin represents the speech of the Yuan capital, Dadu (present
Beijing), around the year 1300, for which Pulleyblank's reconstruction
differs considerably from that of Hugh M. Stimson. The sources and
methods used in these reconstructions were fully discussed in Middle
Chinese, but recent developments in phonological theory have led to some
modifications in detail.
The entries are arranged alphabetically according to the Pinyin system
with an index by the traditional Kangzi radical and stroke numbers. The
Morohashi number is also given for each character, enabling easy refer-
ence to this important Chinese thesaurus. Another useful feature of the
Lexicon is the inclusion of the numbers in Karlgren's Grammata Serica for
characters that are included in that work. Concise English equivalents for
the Chinese words are also provided. Reconstructed forms are given in
the International Phonetic Alphabet. Though this requires a number of
phonetic signs and diacritical marks, these are carefully explained in the
introduction.
Every effort has been made to provide a useful tool for students of
Chinese literature and China's relations with foreign countries as well as
for specialists in Chinese linguistics.
EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK is Professor Emeritus of the Department of
Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of
Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology (1984).
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EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK
Lexicon of Reconstructed
Pronunciation in Early Middle
Chinese, Late Middle
Chinese, and Early Mandarin
UBC Press
Vancouver
©UBC Press 1991
All rights reserved.
10090807060504 5432
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Pulleyblank, Edwin G. (Edwin George) 1922-
Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in early Middle Chinese,
late Middle Chinese, and early Mandarin
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7748-0366-5
1. Chinese language - Middle Chinese, 1200-1919 - Pronunciation.
2. Mandarin dialects - Pronunciation. I. Title.
PL1081.P84 1991 495.IT52 C91-091252-1
Canada
UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our
publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the
Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through
the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
UBC Press
The University of British Columbia
2029 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
604-822-5959 / Fax: [phone]
www.ubcpress.ca
Contents
Acknowledgments / vii
Introduction /1
Lexicon / 23
Index / 427
Bibliography / 487

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The beginnings of this book go very far back and many people have
contributed along the way. K'ai-ying Po T'ang, then a graduate student in
the Department of Asian Studies, was employed with the help of a grant
from the UBC President's Research Fund during one summer in the early
seventies preparing index cards. The contribution of Dr. W. G. Boltz, now
of the University of Washington, who spent a year at UBC in 1976-77,
paid for by a grant from the Canada Council (now the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada) entering translation glosses (since
much revised) on to the cards, should especially be mentioned. The next
stage was the transfer of this material from cards to the UBC mainframe
computer, using radical-stroke order and Morohashi numbers as the key to
the Chinese characters, which it was not yet possible to input directly. This
was done by Eliza Ko, a student in Computer Science, employed under the
British Columbia/Canada Summer Employment Program, Challenge 85,
and the Work-Study Program of the B.C. provincial government in 1985-
86. An important breakthrough came with the transfer from the mainframe
to a Macintosh personal computer which provided much greater flexibility.
Kenneth Szto was employed under the Work-Study program in 1986-87 to
assist in the reformatting that this required. The final step was the obtaining
of a Chinese font, the Qiyi program produced by the Great Eastern
Software Company Limited of Taipei, which has made it possible to input
Chinese characters directly into the computer and to produce photo-ready
copy for the production of the book. The tedious task of inserting the
Chinese characters and converting my hand-made phonetic font to the
Postscript font, IPATimes, was carried out by a research assistant, Elsie
Arbuckle, with the assistance of a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am also grateful for the
assistance in formatting and proofreading the text that I have received from
George Maddison and Jean Wilson of UBC Press.
The editing of the text at all stages and final preparation of the text for
printing have, in the end, fallen to me and errors that remain are my own
responsibility.
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INTRODUCTION
The sounds of spoken language vanish as soon as they are uttered. Since
the invention of the phonograph and more sophisticated electronic means of
recording sound, it has become possible to overcome this limitation so that
we can hear voices from the past speaking in their own accents. For earlier
times, however, written records provide our only means of access to past
utterances. Even for languages with syllabic or alphabetic scripts, this
provides a very imperfect and incomplete mirror of what was said. Such is
the coded nature of language that its message can be translated into written
form even without the actual sound, so that the words of an ancient Greek
bard or a Chinese philosopher which would seem utterly strange to us if we
could actually hear them can reach us and convey their meaning across the
centuries. Nevertheless, much is inevitably lost and there are many reasons
why it is desirable to get closer to the contemporary sound of the speech of
past centuries.
Even for languages written in phonetic scripts recovery of the
pronunciation of bygone days is by no means easy. Language is in a
constant state of flux and spellings become conventionalized and come to
reflect obsolete usages. Moreover, in every culture written language
develops its own conventions that move away from those of the vernacular.
The written norm tends to become a separate code accessible only to the
educated elite. The classical Latin of a Tacitus or a Pliny in the first century
of our era was very different from the vulgar Latin that we find reflected in
Petronius. The actual speech of Tacitus and the Plinys was presumably
much closer. The problem of reconstructing the pronunciation of a
language like Chinese whose script, though containing phonetic principles,
has never corresponded in a simple and direct way to the sounds of the
language is of a different order of magnitude. Some would say that it is an
impossible task. Nevertheless, there are means available and through the
efforts of scholars progress continues to be made.
The most important kind of evidence for getting access to the linguistic
standards of specific historic periods of Chinese is provided by rhyming
dictionaries that, without the use of alphabetic notation of any kind, were
designed to give a key to contemporary pronunciation. This they did both
by arranging the words according to their rhymes and by distinguishing
within each rhyme words which were exact homophones, that is, which
also had the same non-rhyming parts. The compilation of such dictionaries
began in the period of division between Han and Tang but the earliest
surviving example is the Qieyw completed in 601 by Lu Fay an
with the advice of a group of eminent scholars of the time. It is not
quite accurate to call it a surviving example, since there is no complete text
of the Qieyun in the form in which it left the hands of its compiler. It went