User:Benwing/Middle Chinese finals

The system of finals in EMC and LMC
The "final" of a syllable is all of the syllable other than the initial consonant. Finals are often described as consisting of the following three components, in order: an optional glide or "medial" (either a true semivocalic glide, such as /j/ or /w/, or a vocalic "glide" such as /i/ in a dipthong /ie/); a main vowel; and an optional final consonant or "coda" (/j/, /w/, /m/, /n/,, /p/, /t/, or /k/). Terminology can be confusing: The combination of main vowel and final consonant is sometimes called the "rhyme", but the term "rime" (an older spelling of "rhyme") is also used as a synonym of "final" (the entire combination of glide, main vowel and coda).

Native Chinese grammarians of various ages created increasingly sophisticated attempts at analyzing the phonology of the Chinese language of the corresponding time. A heavy impetus was the sophisticated system of linguistic and phonological analysis worked out by the Indian grammarians and transmitted to China through Buddhist influence. By 300 BC, in fact, the Indian grammarians had already developed the world's most sophisticated system of grammatical analysis, a system unrivaled until the development of modern Western linguistics in the 19th century. Among this overall system was a system for analyzing words into sound units comparable to phonemes and for analyzing individual sounds into distinctive features. However, in spite of the long-term connections between China and India established by the Buddhists, Chinese linguists were slow in adopting elements of the Indian system, and some elements were never adopted at all. The all-important analysis of words into individual sound units, for example, had still not been adopted by early 20th-century Chinese linguists of Bernhard Karlgren's time. They still essentially analyzed syllables using the fanqie system (see below) and were unable to analyze a syllable into individual sound units. As a result, they considered it impossible to accurately reconstruct the pronunciation of the language described in the Qieyun and similar ancient sources, and were shocked when Bernhard Karlgren produced exactly such a reconstruction.

The original impetus was to notate the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters and to be able to create accurate rhyming dictionaries for poets. Early dictionaries of this sort would group characters under rhyming groups, and within each group list classes of homophones (two or more characters with the same pronunciation); in the case of characters without homophones, they would sometimes give a "similar"-sounding character, e.g. one differing only in tone, if such a character could be found. This leads to multiple problems: a pronounciation-guide character might itself not be recognized, and a non-exact homophone does not allow the exact pronunciation.

A significant improvement was the Qieyun (c. 600 AD), which describes each homophone class according to two fanqie characters, one of which matches the initial sound of the characters in the homophone class and one of which matches the final. This allows all characters to be described, and the main source for EMC, appears to use multiple synonymous characters to represent each particular initial; likewise for finals. Determining the number of categories actually represented for initials and finals took a good deal of careful work on the part of Chinese linguists, equating two fanqie whenever both occurred in a particular group of homonyms and then applying the transitive closure to create larger groups. The Qieyun itself classifies homonyms under 95 tables, one per rhyme, and the system described above for unifying equivalent fanqie identified 164 separate finals in EMC. Multiple finals grouped into a single rhyme class generally differ only in the medial (especially when it is /w/) or in so-called chongniu doublets.

The "division" and "class" are based on a Late Middle Chinese (LMC) system of classifying the various finals as enumerated in so-called "rime tables", of which the oldest is the Yunjing (c. 1150 AD); however, it may partially reflect an older scheme.

Interpreting the original sources is tricky. The system of fanqie in the [

The Yunjing of LMC notates the 95 EMC finals under 43 tables per tone, according to the traditional Chinese, four-tone analysis, with only a few cases where a single EMC final appears in two tables. These tables are grouped under 16 rhyme categories, and each table is identified as either "open" or "closed" (in Chinese, kaikou and hekou, literally "open-mouth" and "closed-mouth"). Each square in a table represents a particular homonym class in the Qieyun, with an entry corresponding to one of the characters in the homonym class, if any such character exists. Each table has four rows (the so-called "divisions"; see below), and mostly one column per initial. Palatals, retroflexes, and dentals are combined under the same column; however, it turns out that this does not lead to cases where two homonym classes are conflated, as the divisions are arranged so that all would-be minimal pairs distinguished only by the retroflex vs. palatal vs. dental character of the initial end up in different divisions. Furthermore, the collapsing of multiple Qieyun finals into a single table is also done in such a way as to never lead to homonym conflation.

"Open" and "closed" apparently indicates a distinction between non-rounded and rounded vocalic sounds. "Closed" finals either have a rounded vowel (e.g. /u/) or rounded glide.

The division (I, II, III or IV) is trickier to interpret. There are correspondences between certain divisions and the presence or absence of medial glides in later dialects, in ways that differ depending on the class of the initial (e.g. velar, labial, retroflex, etc.). There are also clear co-occurrence restrictions between initials and divisions, in that initials from certain of these same classes can occur with finals only from certain divisions. The LMC authors of this system appear to have been aware of these classes of initials, and seem to have determined the separation into divisions partly on the basis of the co-occurrence relationships and partly on the medial glides, although it is debated how the exact classification was made. It is important to remember that the authors of this system were attempting to use LMC phonology to reconstruct EMC phonology (although they probably thought of it more in terms of trying to harmonize the way that words were normally pronounced with the rather different system of rhymes and homophones as laid out in the Qieyun).

The clearest difference is between division III and other divisions, with division III generally corresponding to palatal initials and/or finals with palatal (i.e. high-front) vowels or glides. In addition, divisions I and IV allow exactly the same set of initials in EMC, suggesting that the distinction between the two postdates the EMC period. Division-IV syllables are commonly thought to reflect a diphthong containing a vocalic glide /i/ in LMC, corresponding to an EMC mid-front monophthong, variously reconstructed as or. Beyond this, there is no consensus.

Karlgren, and many authors following him, suggest that neither divisions I nor II had any medial other than /w/ or /u/, with division I corresponding to back vowels and division II to front vowels. Some authors have suggested that division II corresponded not so much to front vowels as to centralized vowels. Many authors have recently suggested that division-II syllables consistently had a medial /r/ in Old Chinese, although this appeared to have already disappeared by EMC, so it's unclear exactly how this would have been carried forward into LMC. (Some have suggested that the system of divisions dates back at least to the time of the Qieyun (c. 600 AD), and reflects a medial present very early on in the EMC period.)

Pulleyblank notes, first, that there is an additional division of the rhymes into "outer" and "inner", .... that the entire set of open finals occurs only with velar initials, and the entire set of closed finals does not occur with any initials. He suggests that the assignment into divisions proceeeded as follows: First, the open finals were assigned into four divisions according to their (LMC) medial when occurring with a velar initial, arranged by increasing palatalization: no medial, /j/, /i/, /ji/. The closed finals occurring after velars were assigned divisions according to their medial, in analogy with the open finals.

notes that the entire set of finals is represented only with velar initials, and then only in their "open" form. He suggests that the open finals were first assigned to the four divisions based on the with labials and velars, which are the only initials represented in all four divisions, the four divisions correspond in LMC, respectively, to no medial and to the medials /j/, /i/, and /ji/. With other initials, the finals were assigned to divisions

Finals
The following table lists Early Middle Chinese (EMC) reconstructed "finals" (i.e. all of the syllable other than the initial consonant), according to different authors. Finals are often described as consisting of the following three components, in order: an optional glide or "medial" (either a true semivocalic glide, such as /j/ or /w/, or a vocalic "glide" such as /i/ in a dipthong /ie/); a main vowel; and an optional final consonant or "coda" (/j/, /w/, /m/, /n/,, /p/, /t/, or /k/). Terminology can be confusing: The combination of main vowel and final consonant is sometimes called the "rhyme", but the term "rime" (an older spelling of "rhyme") is also used as a synonym of "final" (the entire combination of glide, main vowel and coda).

The table does not include finals ending in /p/, /t/ or /k/ (the so-called "entering tone" syllables), but these can easily be derived by substituting for,  for , and  for. Note also that some columns are not strictly in IPA.