Talk:Old Chinese phonology

uvulars
Perhaps some discussion of Pan Wun's postulation of uvulars and its acceptance and modification in the recent work of Baxter and Sagart should be mentioned. Tibetologist (talk) 10:21, 2 November 2011 (UTC)


 * There's a brief mention in the Back initials subsection. Kanguole 11:41, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Two sets of nasals
What's up with the two sets of nasals? What do the underdots represent?Cromulant (talk) 18:26, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The little circles are the IPA diacritic for voiceless nasals (see nasal consonant). It's mentioned further down, but not in the overview table.  Kanguole 19:42, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Old Chinese apparently has a series of voiceless sonorants (m, n, ng, l, r, w, j). They evolved to become voiceless or aspirated obstruents. For example, the character 許 has a voiceless fricative reading (h or x) in MC, but based on its phonetic component, 午 (ngu? in MC), it was determined that 許 may have had a nasal initial in OC. As they generally correspond to voiceless initials, it was determined that this series were voiceless. Some linguists write them as hm, hn, hng, hl, hr, hw, and hj, which MAY suggest that an aspirate sonorant value is plausible. Hmanck (talk) 23:22, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Transition from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese
This section mostly duplicated material already in the article, so I've merged the new material into the Initials section and moved this section to the Historical Chinese phonology article. The approach here is to present data and show how the theories seek to explain it. Once we've done that, there's no need to do it again in reverse. Kanguole 23:51, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Karlgren's *-r
What are the circumstances under which Karlgren reconstructs *-r? It would also be nice if the article discussed Starostin's proposal to distinguish *-r in Xiesheng series that mix -j and -n in MC. --Tibetologist (talk) 21:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * According to Baxter (p843), Karlgren's *-r was a treatment of the same problem, except that he proposed *-r for MC -j in such pairs, while Starostin proposed it for MC -n. I've added a mention of Starostin's proposal, plus the competing explanation.  Kanguole 23:24, 13 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this clear and useful explanation. --Tibetologist (talk) 11:07, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

What kind of "r" is this "-r-"?
Is it a flap? An alveolar trill? Or a uvular trill? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vc06697 (talk • contribs) 11:19, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't think anyone gives a precise phonetic value for it. Kanguole 23:58, 28 October 2016 (UTC)