User talk:Stellar-oscillation

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 15:27, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

禪 v. 船
The Chinese character talk page is not the exactly the appropriate place to ask your question. Unfortunately me and WhiteWhirlwind ended up using it simply as a forum, which was not exactly appropriate of us either, so I thougt it would be best to answer you here.

I am not so up to date with the latest research, but I can present what it is that I know that's been around for some time. In the illusory world of rhyme tables, 禪 should be a voiced alveo-palatal affricate /dzʲ/ and 船 should be a voiced alveo-palatal fricative /zʲ/, however the distribution in most modern dialects and Sino-Xenic readings would not appear to indicate that. Many of the go-on readings for 禪 initials seem to indicate fricatives rather than affricates. 船、舌、乘、術 are all supposedly 船 initials but that does not explain the affricates in 船、乘 and others in modern Mandarin. The same variation is seen in 禪 initials like 售、仇、市 and 匙. 純 and 唇 for example are supposed to only differ in their initials (禪 and 船 respectively) in Middle Chinese, but they appear to be reflexes of the same sound, the same can be said of 射 and 社 (船 and 禪 respectively) which otherwise only differed in tone in MC.

In my opinion, the two initials were likely in free variation similar to present-day Japanese [z] and [dz] or substandard Mandarin where people vary between [tsʲi] and [tɕi], and (again in my opinion) were originally affricates which simplified to fricatives in free variation with affricates during the Middle Chinese period until settling into set forms, though there is always the possibility that affricates developed later as we see in many Min dialects. The makers of the rhyme dictionaries seem to have attempted to generalize this variation into some illusory standard and so created two initials for what phonologically was a single feature, somewhat similar to 云 and 匣 initials which were simply allophonic variants of the same initial.

A similar thing may be said of low back vowels in many English language dialects. I for example possess all three low back vowels in my phonetic inventory but where the phonological environment permits, they are in free variation with one another in most words except in cases where I try to keep them distinct like Ronis v. rawness, and were I and a few others like myself to make dictionaries on our own we would all end up with drastically different pronunciations placed on words with low back vowels which I assume is mostly what happened in making the rhyme dictionaries, but I am not so up to date with the latest research so this may not answer your question satisfactorily and I may be horribly wrong but I hope it is helpful. Questions like these are rarely resolved satisfactorily since there is rarely any real way of proving them. Debates like these often degenerate into political clashes and ideological battles among differents cliques where otherwise dignified academics often degenerate into bickering children. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 05:44, 13 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much for the explanation. It was always very difficult for me to distinguish which character belongs 禪 and which 船 based on modern Mandarin pronunciation. There seems to be some rules but the rules fail all the time.


 * But I do have one question. You suggest that 禪 and 船 might have varied freely in MC. Do you mean all stages of MC? I believe this is the case for middle and late MC. But for early MC, I think the distinction between the two should be clear. 顏氏家訓音辭: 則南人以錢為涎，以石為射，以賤為羨，以是為舐... I would have imagined 顏之推 knew the 'correct' distinction between 石 and 射, 是 and 舐. Otherwise, he wouldn't have made such statement.Stellar-oscillation (talk) 21:22, 21 February 2013 (UTC)


 * It likely varied in all stages of Middle Chinese but not for all speakers which is what the Yan quote is getting at where he's basically complaining that southerners confuse 禪 with 船. When we speak of MC of the historical record, we are speaking of an artifical, heterogeneous language based on a mixture of features from many dialects which was learned by officials from all over the country who would carry influences over from their dialects and were often unable to produce the sounds based on other dialects. There's a similar situation with Chao Yuen-ren's initial Mandarin pronunciation dictionary which included the 入聲 that none of the northerners could pronounce so Standard Mandarin has four tones instead of five. Furthermore, when we speak of the MC of the rhyme tables we are invariably speaking of Late Middle Chinese, so my claim was implicitly excluding Early Middle Chinese thought it might have varied freely even then given that Yan feels the need to teach his own family how to pronounce them correctly. Most of EMC is inferred from the very incomplete Qieyun and other sources. It was simply its system that laid the foundation for later rhyme tables that we normally refer to when we speak of rhyme tables. Pulleyblank, Lu Zhiwei and others have used your quote above along with other evidence as a means of debunking Karlgren's analysis which is the opposite of what I presented above. Their work has largely been the basis of the consensus formed since the 60s and 70s (assuming it too has not been debunked in the last few years).


 * Getting to the heart of your question though, it was likely distinct in EMC for speakers (like Yan) who possessed such a distinction in their dialects which were the ones used as the basis of the distinction though this fact is not so helpful for us since we don't know which specific dialects in question were used as the basis for the featural distinction and how widespread they were. There is some evidence that they evolved from distinct sounds in Ancient Chinese, but once the distinction was blurred it seems to have been absolute. This problem is also exacerbated by Beiyu's tragic omission of the subject in the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects. This distinction was likely muddied later on even for these speakers by the presence of "southerners" who did not distinguish between them and perhaps are responsible for introducing the free variation I mentioned or the perception of the sounds as similar though this may have still otherwise been completely idiopathic. It can never be proved of course, but at present there appears (at least in the scope of my exposure to the subject) to be no dialect which regularly distinguishes between these two initials in line with the Qieyun, so this lack of dialectal evidence would appear to preclude this distinction as having been any meaningful part of the phonological core of the Chinese language for the previous thousand years or so. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 11:54, 26 February 2013 (UTC)