The Phonological Characteristics of Northern Chinese of the Jin Dynasty
In: Bulletin of Chinese LinguisticsSearch for other papers by Zhongwei Shen in
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This article analyzes the phonological characteristics of modern northern Mandarin that can be retrieved from Chinese loanwords written in the Jurchen script. The Jurchen materials used are basically the steles of the Jin dynasty. In the analyses an internal contrastive method is used to determine phonological categories to avoid circular arguments in dealing with the transcriptions between two unknown languages. The results of our analyses demonstrate that the limited Chinese loanwords in the Jurchen language actually contain critical information about the Chinese phonology of the Jin dynasty (1115-1234). The analyses of ten phonological characteristics show that Jin Chinese is clearly related to modern northern Mandarin as represented by the Beijing dialect. The phonological characteristics of Jin Chinese provide an important piece of information about the history of Mandarin before the Zhongyuan Yinyun 中原音韻 of 1324, which is commonly perceived as the earliest evidence of Mandarin phonology.
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| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
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The Phonological Characteristics of Northern Chinese of the Jin Dynasty
In: Bulletin of Chinese LinguisticsSearch for other papers by Zhongwei Shen in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article analyzes the phonological characteristics of modern northern Mandarin that can be retrieved from Chinese loanwords written in the Jurchen script. The Jurchen materials used are basically the steles of the Jin dynasty. In the analyses an internal contrastive method is used to determine phonological categories to avoid circular arguments in dealing with the transcriptions between two unknown languages. The results of our analyses demonstrate that the limited Chinese loanwords in the Jurchen language actually contain critical information about the Chinese phonology of the Jin dynasty (1115-1234). The analyses of ten phonological characteristics show that Jin Chinese is clearly related to modern northern Mandarin as represented by the Beijing dialect. The phonological characteristics of Jin Chinese provide an important piece of information about the history of Mandarin before the Zhongyuan Yinyun 中原音韻 of 1324, which is commonly perceived as the earliest evidence of Mandarin phonology.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 527 | 150 | 20 |
| Full Text Views | 234 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 160 | 6 | 0 |
